The RSC is delighted to announce the appointment of Professor Penny Brothers as the next Director of the Research School of Chemistry. Penny joins us from the University of Auckland where she has served as Assistant Deputy-Vice-Chancellor (Academic), Deputy-Head (Academic) of the School of Chemical Sciences, and Associate Deputy-Vice-Chancellor (Research).

Penny is a New Zealander, educated at the University of Auckland and Stanford University.  She has been in the University of Auckland’s School of Chemical Sciences since 1988 and has been a visiting professor at the Universities of California at Davis and at Berkeley, the Universities of Heidelberg, Münster and Burgundy, Peking University, the Arctic University of Norway and Los Alamos National Laboratory (where she was a Fulbright Senior Scholar).  Penny is a Principal Investigator in the MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Nanomaterials, on the Marsden Fund Council and an Associate Editor of Chemical Communications.

Penny’s current research interests focus on the chemistry of boron coordinated to porphyrin and corrole ligands, BODIPY fluorophores for sugar recognition and surface patterning using molecular pentagons.

Professor John Carver will continue to lead RSC until Penny commences in the role in February 2019.

The RSC would like to take this opportunity to thank John for leading the school with great distinction since 2013.