Richard Robson (chemist)

Richard Robson is an English and Australian chemist and Professor of Chemistry at the University of Melbourne, born in Glusburn, West Yorkshire, on 4 June 1937. He read chemistry at Brasenose College, Oxford, earning a BA in 1959 and a DPhil in 1962, with doctoral research supervised by John A. Barltrop at the Dyson Perrins Laboratory on the photochemistry of organic molecules. He conducted postdoctoral research at the California Institute of Technology from 1962 to 1964 and at Stanford University from 1964 to 1965 under Henry Taube before accepting a lectureship in chemistry at the University of Melbourne. He specialises in coordination polymers, particularly metal-organic frameworks, and has been described as a pioneer in crystal engineering involving transition metals. In 2025 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry jointly with Susumu Kitagawa and Omar M. Yaghi for the development of metal-organic frameworks.