Professor Jonathan W Essex BA (MA) DPhil
Head of Chemistry, Professor of Computational Systems Chemistry

Professor Jonathan W Essex is Professor of Computational Systems Chemistry within Chemistry at the University of Southampton.
Jonathan Essex was an undergraduate at Oriel College, Oxford, and graduated with a first class honours degree in Chemistry in 1989. He then studied for a D.Phil. in computational modelling under the supervision of Prof W.G. Richards at the same institution. During his postgraduate degree he was supported by a Glaxo Research Scholarship. Having obtained his D.Phil. in 1992, he took up an SERC/NATO Postdoctoral Fellowship in the group of Prof W.L. Jorgensen at Yale University. In 1994 he returned to the UK to the University of Southampton as a Royal Society University Research Fellow. He was appointed Lecturer in 1997, Senior Lecturer in 2001, Reader in 2005 and to a Personal Chair in 2007.
Jon was awarded the 2002 Marlow Medal from the Royal Society of Chemistry for his work in the development of techniques and application of molecular simulations to the study of proteins and related systems of biological importance. He was awarded a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award in 2013. He is an Editorial Board member of the Journal of Computer Aided Molecular Design and an editorial advisor for BMC Chemistry. In addition, he serves on the Advisory Board of CCPBioSim, a collaborative chemistry project dedicated to biomolecular computer simulations, is a member of the EPSRC college, and has served on the Project Working Group for the procurement of HECToR, the UK’s next generation supercomputer.