Rate My Professor Andrew Weller

Professor Andrew Weller is the Professor of Inorganic Chemistry in the Department of Chemistry at the University of York, a position he assumed in January 2020 upon moving with his research group from the University of Oxford. There, he had served as Professor of Chemistry and Fellow of Magdalen College since 2007. Weller launched his independent academic career at the University of Bath in 1999 as a Royal Society University Research Fellow, achieving promotion to Reader in 2004. His educational background includes a first degree from the University of Warwick and a PhD from the University of Bristol supervised by Dr. John Jeffery, complemented by postdoctoral research associate roles at Heriot-Watt University under Professor Alan Welch and at the University of Notre Dame with Professor Tom Fehlner. In his current role, he acts as Deputy Head of Department (Research) and was previously co-director of the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Inorganic Synthesis for Future Manufacturing at Oxford.

The research of Professor Weller and his group centers on synthetic organometallic chemistry and catalysis, with a particular emphasis on generating and stabilizing transition metal complexes of low coordination number that display novel C–H, B–H, and C–C bonding modes through agostic or sigma interactions. This work explores the fundamentals of their synthesis, bonding, structure, and reactivity, alongside applications in catalytic bond activations such as C–H, B–H, and C–C transformations for producing platform chemicals, new materials, and fine chemicals, including dehydropolymerization processes and solid-state molecular organometallic chemistry. Among his accolades are the European Research Council Advanced Grant for the PRECISION-SMOM project worth €2.5 million over five years (2025–2030), EPSRC Established Career Fellowship (2015–2022), Royal Society of Chemistry Frankland Award (2016), and inaugural Dalton Transactions European Lectureship (2008). He has held numerous visiting positions, including Peter Wall Institute Scholar at UBC (2013/14), Howard Fellow at UNSW (2015), and lectureships at UCLA (2020) and Indiana University (2022). Select publications include “Mechanistic Insight into Molecular Crystalline Organometallic Heterogeneous Catalysis Through Parahydrogen Based Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Studies” (J. Am. Chem. Soc., 2023), “Controlled Synthesis of Well-Defined Polyaminoboranes on Scale Using a Robust and Efficient Catalyst” (J. Am. Chem. Soc., 2021), “Single-Crystal to Single-Crystal Addition of H2 to [Ir(iPr-PONOP)(propene)][BArF4]” (Organometallics, 2022), and “Dehydropolymerization of H3B·NMeH2 Mediated by Cationic Iridium(III) Precatalysts” (ACS Catal., 2022).