Vernon Gibson

Vernon Gibson is a chemist by background, trained at the Universities of Sheffield (BSc) and Oxford (DPhil) followed by a period as a NATO post-doctoral fellow at the California Institute of Technology. His career has spanned academia, industry and Government.

He was Chief Scientific Adviser to the UK Ministry of Defence from 2012 to 2016 and Chief Chemist at bp from 2008 to 2012. Prior to this he was the Sir Edward Frankland bp Professor of Inorganic Chemistry at Imperial College London where he developed an international reputation for his fundamental studies on metal complexes and discoveries of new catalyst systems for the production of commercially relevant polymeric materials for which he was elected to the Royal Society in 2004.

He co-founded the successful Imperial College spin-out company Plaxica in 2008. Vernon is a member of bp’s Technology Advisory Council and is employed as an advisor to several UK Universities. He was appointed Companion of the Order of the Bath in the 2017 Queen’s New Year’s Honours list, for services to Defence. In 2017 he was appointed at the Executive Director of ICAM.