Rate My Professor Robert Chapman

Dr. Robert Chapman serves as Senior Lecturer in the Discipline of Chemistry within the School of Environmental and Life Sciences at the University of Newcastle, holding a joint appointment as Adjunct Lecturer at the School of Chemistry, UNSW Sydney. He obtained a Bachelor of Engineering with First Class Honours in Industrial Chemistry from the University of New South Wales between 2002 and 2007. After a stint as Associate Consultant at the Boston Consulting Group from 2008 to 2009, he completed his PhD in Chemistry at the University of Sydney from 2009 to 2012, supervised by Professors Sébastien Perrier and Katrina Jolliffe, with research on the synthesis and self-assembly of cyclic peptide-polymer conjugates. Subsequently, he was a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Professor Molly Stevens' laboratory at Imperial College London from 2013 to 2015, developing nanomaterial-based biosensors and scaffolds for tissue engineering. In 2016, he returned to Australia as Vice-Chancellor's Research Fellow at UNSW School of Chemistry, progressing to Lecturer and ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) Fellow from 2017 to 2020. He assumed his current position at the University of Newcastle in 2020.

Dr. Chapman's research centers on polymer chemistry, leveraging high-throughput polymerization techniques to create polymer therapeutics, engineer polymers that fold into protein-like mimics, and design polymers binding to proteins, enzymes, and antibodies. His expertise includes peptide-driven self-assembly, drug delivery, protein delivery, tissue engineering, and nanoparticle-based biosensing, with research classifications in supramolecular chemistry (40%) and macromolecular materials (60%). Key publications encompass PhotoRAFT Polymerization (2021), Peptide–Polymer Conjugates: Synthetic Design Strategies (2016), Traceless pH-Sensitive Antibody Conjugation Inspired by Citraconic Anhydride (2022), High throughput screening for the design of protein binding polymers (2025), Collapsed Star Copolymers Exhibiting Near Perfect Mimicry of the Therapeutic Protein TRAIL (2024), A High Throughput Approach for Designing Polymers That Mimic the TRAIL Protein (2022), Tuneable peptide cross-linked nanogels for enzyme-triggered protein delivery (2020), and Automation of Controlled/Living Radical Polymerization (2020). He holds the ARC DECRA Fellowship (2017-2020) and Vice-Chancellor's Research Fellowship, and serves as Treasurer of the RACI Polymer Division.