Professor Philip Mountford

Professor Mountford gained his D.Phil degree at Balliol College, Oxford under the supervision of Professor M.L.H. Green (1990). He remained in Oxford as a Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson College, and in 1992 moved directly to his first independent faculty position at the University of Nottingham.

In 1998 Philip returned to Oxford and St Edmund Hall where his research interests have broadly centred around the synthesis, structure, bonding and stoichiometric and catalytic reactivity of organometallic compounds of the early transition and lanthanide metals, and the alkaline earth metals. This research has had a particular emphasis on compounds with metal-nitrogen multiple bonds (and other unusual metal-element bonds), homogeneous olefin polymerisation, and ring-opening polymerisation. He is an author of 265 articles and patents (H index 50, ca 8,700 citations, 32 citations per peer-reviewed article) and has presented his group’s research at ca 150 international and national conferences and meetings, and university and industry seminars.

He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry and has received several national and international awards and guest professorships. Most recently, he was awarded the 2015 Schlenk Lectureship sponsored by BASF and the University of Tübingen, Germany, and in 2014 was awarded a PKU-Eli Lilly prize lectureship by Beijing University. He received the RSC Organometallic Chemistry (Frankland) Award for 2012-2013 and is also a former recipient of the RSC’s Sir Edward Frankland Fellowship (1998-1999) for organometallic chemistry.

Philip has held Visiting Professorships at the Universite Louis Pasteur, Strasbourg, the University of Bordeaux, the University of Tübingen and the University of Heidelberg.  He has also contributed to the general academic community within both the University sector and the RSC. From 2008 to 2016 he was successively Executive Deputy/Acting Head and then Head of Inorganic Chemistry at Oxford.  From 2012 to 2015 he was Chairman of the Editorial Board of Dalton Transactions and Chairman of the Editorial Board of Specialist Periodical Reports from 2016 to 2018. He also served on the Dalton Division Council of the RSC from 2012 to 2015.