Rate My Professor Bao Nguyen

Bao Nguyen is a Professor in Physical Organic Chemistry in the School of Chemistry at the University of Leeds, where he joined in September 2012. He earned his PhD in Organic Chemistry from the University of Oxford in 2008 under the supervision of John M. Brown FRS, building on his Bachelor of Science (Advanced stream, Honours) from the University of Sydney in 2002. After his PhD, he remained at Oxford in Michael C. Willis's group, where he developed the first palladium-catalysed coupling reaction employing sulfur dioxide by suppressing catalyst deactivation. Subsequently, he joined King Kuok (Mimi) Hii's group at Imperial College London to delineate the nature of palladium species in various catalytic reactions and to develop separation methods for these species. He was awarded his first independent position as a Ramsay Memorial Fellow at the Department of Chemistry, Imperial College London.

Professor Nguyen's research interests centre on understanding chemical processes to rationally improve and optimise their applications in academia and industry. His highly collaborative work interfaces physical, organic, and process chemistry with chemical engineering. Current themes encompass organic synthesis on water and green chemistry, the application of AI and machine learning to predict chemical properties and reactivity, mechanistic studies of metal-catalysed reactions, and CO2 utilisation in high-value chemical manufacture. He is a core member of the Institute for Process Research and Development (iPRD) and serves as Manager of the Sustainable Science and Technology MSc programme. A member of the Royal Society of Chemistry, he actively supervises postgraduate researchers and welcomes enquiries for PhD opportunities. Key publications include "Graph-Based Internal Coordinate Analysis for Transition State Characterisation" (J. Chem. Theory Comput., 2026, with A.S. Goodfellow), "Improvements in micelle promoted DNA-encoded library synthesis by surfactant optimisation" (Org. Biomol. Chem., 2025), "Reactivities of N-Nitrosamines against Common Reagents and Reaction Conditions" (Org. Process Res. Dev., 2024), "Automated Transition Metal Catalysts Discovery and Optimisation with AI and Machine Learning" (ChemCatChem, 2024, with S. Mace and Y. Xu), and "Activation of Fluoride Anion as Nucleophile in Water with Data-Guided Surfactant Selection" (Chemical Science, 2024, with K. Sharma et al.). In February 2025, he delivered his Inaugural Lecture in the School of Chemistry.