Alistair grew up in the (sometimes) sunny seaside town of Weymouth, UK. He received his MChem from the University of Oxford in 2017, where he nurtured his passion for organic chemistry by spending a semester at ETH Zürich in the group of Prof. Erick Carreira, before returning to Oxford to work on the total synthesis of the heronamide family of natural products with Prof. Ed Anderson. He remained in Oxford for his DPhil as part of the Synthesis for Biology & Medicine CDT program, for which he was awarded the Oxford-Radcliffe Scholarship to fund his studies. Alistair had the good fortune of joining the group of Prof. Harry Anderson for a rotation project, not only to work on the on-surface synthesis of cyclocarbon analogues in collaboration with IBM, but also dip his toe into the waters of computational chemistry.
The arrival of Prof. Fernanda Duarte to Oxford marked the beginning of Alistair’s career as a theoretical physical organic chemist, where they worked together with Prof. Ed Anderson to understand the relationships between electron delocalization, bonding in small rings, and strain release reactivity. Alistair also worked on topics including reaction modelling (with Profs. James Bull, Cristoph Aïssa, Tim Donohoe, and Drs. Russell Smith and James Mousseau), multi-ionization processes (with Profs. John Eland and Raimund Feifel), transmembrane anion transport (with Profs. Matthew Langton and Paul Beer), and atropisomerism dynamics (with Prof. Jonathan Clayden). He also contributed to projects on automated reaction profile generation and combinatorial chemical space pruning (with Prof. Jotun Hein). Following the completion of his DPhil, Alistair was awarded the EPSRC Doctoral Prize Fellowship, where he spent a further six months working with Prof. Duarte on strain release chemistry.
In 2022 Alistair crossed the pond to Berkeley, California, where he joined the group of Prof. Martin Head-Gordon as a postdoctoral scholar at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and the University of California, Berkeley. In this role, Alistair attempted to unify the century-old debate about the origins of chemical bonding, focusing on the physical mechanisms that control the extent of electron delocalization during bond formation. Alistair also collaborated with Prof. John Hartwig to understand organometallic C–H functionalization reactions for use in polymer upcycling processes, and with Prof. Jeffrey Long to design degradation-resistant metal-organic frameworks for carbon capture and storage technologies.
Alistair began his independent career at The University of Texas at Dallas in August 2024.
Outside of the lab, Alistair is passionate about nature (in particular birds), sports including cricket and baseball, and good food – all of which can thankfully be found in and around Dallas!