Craig Butts

Professor Craig Butts is the Head of the School of Chemistry and Professor of Structural and Mechanistic Chemistry at the University of Bristol.

Following his BSc(Hons) at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand (1991-93), Professor Craig Butts conducted a PhD with Professor Michael Hartshorn studying the photonitration of aromatics with tetranitromethane (1994-1996). During his PhD he developed a strong interest in both mechanistic determination but also chemical structure elucidation and it is the latter of these which has driven his research interests since.

He was appointed to Lectureships in Physical, and subsequently Organic, chemistry at the University of Exeter (1999-2005) where he developed interests in the application of Physical Organic methods to emerging chemical fields – specifically fullerene and ionic liquid chemistry. In 2005 Professor Craig Butts moved to the University of Bristol.

The Butts Research Group tackles challenges based around organic molecular structure and reaction mechanism, principally using NMR spectroscopy – the most information-rich analytical technique available to chemists. The groups interests are extremely diverse, ranging from experimental NMR method development, to natural product structure elucidation and developing software tools for molecular structure elucidation. The group are heavy users of computation to model experimental outcomes given molecular dynamics in solution and most recently moving into machine learning approaches.