Vernon C. Gibson

Vernon Charles Gibson CB FRS (born 15 November 1958) is a British chemist and academic, and served as Chief Scientific Adviser at the Ministry of Defence between 2012 and 2016. He is also a Visiting Professor at Imperial College London.

He was born in Grantham, Lincolnshire, the son of Dennis and Pamela Gibson. He attended the King’s School in Grantham, then studied Chemistry at Sheffield where he graduated in 1980. After gaining a D.Phil. in Malcolm Green's group at Oxford, he went to the California Institute of Technology on a NATO postdoctoral fellowship where he further developed his interest in organometallic chemistry and catalysis with John Bercaw.

In 1986 he returned to the UK to a lectureship in Inorganic Chemistry at the University of Durham, where he was appointed to a chair in 1993. At Durham he developed his interest in the use of organometallic and coordination compounds for the synthesis of polymers. In 1995, he moved to Imperial College London, where in collaboration with BP Chemicals, he established a Discovery Programme to research novel catalysts for the polymerisation of alkenes. He became the first holder of the Sir Geoffrey Wilkinson Chair in 1998, and became the Sir Edward Frankland BP Professor of Inorganic Chemistry and Head of Catalysis & Advanced Materials in 2001. In 2008, he became chief chemist at British Petroleum.

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