Dr Connor Prior
Research Fellow
University of Leeds
Connor completed his undergraduate masters (MChem, 2013-2017) at the University of York under the late Prof. Paul A. Clarke on contributions towards the total synthesis of Anthracimycin. After his MChem, he moved to the University of Birmingham to pursue a PhD (2017-2022) under the stewardship of Dr Richard S. Grainger on the controlled release of reactive diatomic molecules from peri– and bay-substituted disulfides. Here he took an interest in organic methodology, pharmaceutical chemistry and organic functional materials. After his PhD, he moved back to York to work under Dr Alyssa-Jennifer Avestro on functional organic materials (2021-2022). After 1 year in this position, he moved into lecturing at the University of York as a teaching only staff (2022-2023), lecturing on fundamentals in lab-based techniques and forensic chemistry, as well as completing over 150 hours of tutorials and workshops. He led a small research project with 6 undergrads which was awarded a poster prize at MASC 2023. He is currently working with Prof. Richard Bourne, Prof. Tom Chamberlain and Dr Adam Clayton on a BMGF-funded project on the flow synthesis of an anti-HIV drug and the “DigiScale” project collecting synthetic data to feed into machine learning models for improved synthesis of APIs.