Dame Carol Vivien Robinson, Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire, Federal Reserve System FMedSci is a British chemistry
Background
Born in Kent, the daughter of Denis E. Bradley and Lillian (née Holder), Carol Vivien Bradley left school at 16 and began her career as a lab technician in Sandwich, Kent with Pfizer, where she began working with the then novel technique of mass spectrometry.
Education
After earning her degree, she left Pfizer and studied for a Master of Science degree at the University of Swansea, followed by a Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge, which she completed in just two years, rather than the more usual three.
Career
She is a Royal Society Research Professor at the Physical and Theoretical Chemistry Laboratory at the University of Oxford, as well as the Doctor Lee"s Professor of Chemistry Electronics She was previously Professor of Mass Spectrometry at the Department of Chemistry of the University of Cambridge. Her potential was spotted, and she gained further qualifications at evening classes and day release from her job at Pfizer.
During this time she was a student at Churchill College, Cambridge.
After a postdoctoral training fellowship at the University of Bristol, she took eight years out to raise a family. She returned to science by taking up a junior position in the mass spectrometry unit at the University of Oxford, where she began analysing protein folding.
In 2001, she returned to Cambridge to take up a professorship in the Department of Chemistry, becoming this department"s first female professor She took up her current position in Oxford in 2009.