Biography
David Leigh was born in Birmingham, England, on May 31, 1963. He received his BSc degree in Chemistry in 1984 from the University of Sheffield (UK) followed by a PhD in 1987 under J. Fraser Stoddart (before either of them had made a catenane, rotaxane or knot!). From 1987-1989 Leigh was a postdoctoral fellow at the National Research Council of Canada in Ottawa, Canada, studying carbohydrate-protein interactions. In 1989 he returned to the UK as a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST, since 2004 part of the University of Manchester). He moved to become Professor of Synthetic Chemistry at the University of Warwick (1998-2001) and then Forbes Chair of Organic Chemistry at the University of Edinburgh (2001-2012) before returning to Manchester in 2012 where he is now the Sir Samuel Hall Chair of Chemistry, the only named chair in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Manchester (UK), a historic center for the physical sciences (Dalton, Joule, Rutherford, Bragg, Perkin, Robinson, Haworth, Turing, Geim, etc). Since 2016 Leigh has been a Royal Society Research Professor, a position held by a small number of Fellows of the Royal Society, the UK’s National Academy of Science and Letters. Since 2018 he is also a Distinguished Professor at East China Normal University, Shanghai. Leigh is a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS), the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE), an International Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the Academia Europaea and an honorary member of the Israel Chemical Society. He is currently President-elect of the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC), 2026-28 (President, 2028-30).
Leigh is a leading pioneer of molecular ratchet mechanisms (non-equilibrium molecular dynamics) and nanotopology. Landmark examples from Leigh’s laboratory include the first synthetic Brownian ratchets (2004-2007). The Leigh group have developed dynamic systems with increasingly complex and functional mechanisms of operation, including an acclaimed synthetic ribosome mimic (2013). In the last decade his group reported the first examples of autonomous chemically fuelled molecular ratchets (2016, 2021 & 2022), used knotting to induce allosteric catalysis (2017), introduced small-molecule robotics (2016) and developed a programmable ‘molecular assembler’ described in an accompanying Nature N&Vs article as ‘Science fiction becomes fact’ (2017). The citation of his August Wilhelm von Hofmann Medal from the German Chemical Society (GDCh) states ‘If the evolution of life on earth would have needed a competent consultant, he would have been the number one choice’ (2024).
Leigh has authored >345 publications, including Nature (11), Science (9), Nat. Chem. (12), PNAS (7), JACS (76) and Angew. Chem. (54). These have accrued >43000 citations, with an h index of 112 (GooSch 28 May 2026). ~1-in-8 of Leigh’s papers have been the subject of independent published perspectives (‘News & Views’ articles) by other leading scientists.
Leigh is also known for activities that merge art with science (video, music, magic, social media, traditional media, www, public lectures). ‘Nanobot’ [https://bit.ly/2Qw8qRn], a video he commissioned in 2018, generates >1M views per year across platforms. Social media show Leigh’s videos being widely used by teachers in high schools [https://bit.ly/36t1nyr], in university courses [https://bit.ly/2MXkzg0], and by the general public. Leigh’s molecular 819 knot (Science 2017) appears in the Guinness Book of World Records as ‘the world’s tightest knot’; his molecularly woven material (Nature 2020) holds the Guinness World Record for ‘the finest woven fabric’.
The Leigh group’s research contributions have been recognized with a number of scientific awards, including the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) Prizes for Supramolecular Chemistry (2003), Interdisciplinary Research (2004), Nanotechnology (2005) and the RSC Merck (2009), Tilden (2010), Pedler (2014), Perkin (2017), Horizon (2023) Prizes, the RSC-Spanish Chemical Society (RSEQ) Prize for Chemistry (2007), the Institute of Chemistry of Ireland Award for Chemistry (2005), German Chemical Society (GDCh) August Wilhelm von Hofmann Medal (2024), American Chemical Society (ACS) Ronald Breslow Award for Achievement in Biomimetic Chemistry (2026), Feynman Prize for Nanotechnology (2007), the International Izatt-Christensen Award in Macrocyclic Chemistry (2007), the EU Descartes Prize for Transnational Research (2007), the ISNSCE (International Society for Nanoscale Science, Computation and Engineering) Nanoscience Prize (2019), Royal Medal (Royal Society of Edinburgh, 2021), and the International Solvay Chair in Chemistry (2028). Leigh is a Clarivate Analytics Highly-Cited Researcher and is listed in Academic Influence’s ‘Top Influential Chemists 2010-2020’.
Plenary Lecture
Title: Why Nature Chose Catalysis
Abstract
