Professor Dame Carol Robinson to head new NanoScience Institute

Exeter Fellow Dame Carol Robinson, Royal Society Research Professor and Dr Lee’s Professor of Chemistry, has been appointed the inaugural director of Oxford’s new Kavli Institute for NanoScience Discovery.

The Institute will be a unique combination of structural biology with world-leading biochemistry, pathology, chemistry, physics, physiology and engineering. Based in a new building at the centre of Oxford’s Science Area site, it will house more than 40 faculty and 400 students, postdocs and research staff. It has been made possible thanks to a $10 million gift from The Kavli Foundation and it will be the 20th Kavli Institute globally and The Kavli Foundation’s fifth institute in nanoscience when it opens its doors in January 2021.

Professor Robinson will lead the new Institute, providing programmatic vision. Professor Robinson is a highly decorated chemist known for her work in using mass spectrometry to elucidate the 3D structures of proteins.

Professor Robinson said: ‘Scientific research increasingly involves collaboration between different disciplines due to the complexity of cutting-edge work.

‘By bringing multiple disciplines together under the same roof to advance scientific research the new Kavli Institute will create an environment that encourages the cross-pollination of ideas and inter-disciplinary cooperation.

‘I am delighted to be the first director of The Kavli Institute for NanoScience Discovery with its mission of bringing the physical sciences into the cell. The opportunity to shape this new interdisciplinary centre where the outcomes are not determined in advance, but discovered through experiment, is something that resonates strongly with me.’

Professor Robinson pictured receiving an honorary degree from the Weizmann Institute during Michaelmas Term. Photo by Will Thomas Freeman