Professor Graham Hutchings CBE FREng FRS

Regius Professor of Chemistry, Cardiff University

Professor Graham Hutchings is distinguished for his work pioneering the use of gold catalysts. He was the first to predict and subsequently demonstrate that gold would be a highly effective catalyst for acetylene hydrochlorination to produce vinyl chloride monomer (VCM), which is now commercialised extensively in Asia. This discovery led to a new field of applied catalysis, and he has subsequently pioneered the use of metal catalysts for several demanding applications that are undergoing commercialisation today. His early work as a researcher and plant manager at ICI made discoveries with oxidation catalysts that are still commercially operated.