Education
New College.
New College.
Davies obtained his Bachelor in 1973 from New College, Oxford and his Doctorate.Phil. in 1975 under the supervision of Gordon H. Whitham. He subsequently held an Imperial Chemical Industries Postdoctoral Fellowship working with Malcolm Green (1975-1977) and a North Atlantic Treaty Organization Fellowship working with Derek Barton (1977-1978) before joining the National Center for Scientific Research at Gif-sur-Yvette as Attaché de Recherche working with Hugh Felkin. In 1980 he returned to Oxford to take up a University Lectureship in Chemistry.
Whilst remaining an active academic, in 1991 he founded Oxford Asymmetry Limited (an asymmetric synthesis company) as sole investor.
He also founded Oxford Diversity Limited (a combinatorial chemistry company). These two companies were combined to form Oxford Asymmetry International Plc in 1999 which was sold to Evotec in 2000, valued at £316m.
In 2003 he founded VASTox (Value Added Screening Technology Oxford) a zebrafish screening company. lieutenant floated on American Institute of Management in 2004 and has since acquired Dainolabs (zebrafish) and Dextra (a carbohydrate chemistry company) as well as the assets of MNL Pharma.
VASTox then changed its name to Summit.
In 2009 the zebrafish screening operations was acquired by Evotec for £0.5 Million. In 1996, he became Professor of Chemistry and in 2006, Waynflete Professor of Chemistry. Davies along with Malcolm Green and Michael Mingos have compiled a set of rules that summarize where nucleophilic additions will occur on pi ligands.
Hickinbottom Fellowship (1984).
Hickinbottom Fellowship (1984) Pfizer Award for Chemistry (1985 and 1988) Royal Society of Chemistry Award for Organometallic Chemistry (1987) Royal Society of Chemistry Bader Award (1989) Royal Society of Chemistry Tilden Lecture Award (1997/98) Royal Society of Chemistry Award in Stereochemistry in 1997 Prize Lectureship of the Society of Synthetic Organic Chemistry, Japan in 1998 Royal Society of Chemistry Perkin Prize for Organic Chemistry in 2011.
