Carol V. Robinson

Carol Robinson holds the University Chair of Dr. Lee’s Professor of Chemistry and is the first Director of the Kavli Institute for Nanoscience Discovery at Oxford. She is recognized for establishing mass spectrometry as a viable technology to study the structure, function and interactions of proteins and their complexes. Her collaborations span both academic and industrial laboratories and in 2016, her spin-out company, OMass Technologies, was founded. Now trading as OMass Therapeutics, the company uses high definition native mass spectrometry to develop drug therapies for use in immunologic and genetic disorders. 

Carol graduated from the Royal Society of Chemistry in 1979 and completed her PhD at the University of Cambridge. She took a career break of eight years to bring up her children and later became the first female Professor of Chemistry at the University of Cambridge (2001-2009). She has held the Dr. Lee’s Chair in Chemistry since 2009 and is Oxford’s first female Professor of Chemistry. Her work has attracted over twenty awards and prizes including most recently, the Othmer Gold Medal from the Science History Institute (2020), Royal Medal A from the Royal Society, Novozymes Prize from the Novo Nordisk Foundation and Stein and Moore Award from the Protein Society (2019). Carol is the former President of the Royal Society of Chemistry (2018-2020) and a Foreign Associate of the National Academy of Sciences. She holds fifteen honorary doctorates and offices and received a DBE in 2013 for her contributions to science and industry.