Greg Challis Biography

Greg Challis graduated with a BSc in Chemistry (1994) from Imperial College London and a DPhil in Organic Chemistry (1998) from the University of Oxford, for research carried out under the supervision of Prof Sir Jack Baldwin FRS. He carried out postdoctoral research as a Wellcome Trust International Prize Travelling Research Fellow in the Department of Chemistry at Johns Hopkins University, USA, with Prof Craig Townsend (1998-2000) and in the Department of Genetics at John Innes Centre, UK, with Prof Keith Chater FRS (2000-2001). In 2001, he took up a lectureship in Chemical Biology in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Warwick. In 2003, he was promoted to Senior Lecturer and in 2006 he was promoted to Professor. In July 2016, he was appointed as the Monash Warwick Alliance Professor of Sustainable Chemistry (Chemical and Synthetic Biology), a joint position between the Department of Chemistry at the University of Warwick, and the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.

From 2013-2018 he led a £4.5 million BBSRC Strategic Longer or Larger Award (sLoLa), involving the Universities of Warwick, Cambridge, Bristol, and Manchester and the international agrochemical company Syngenta. From 2014-2022 he was the 'Engineering Biosynthetic Pathways' theme leader in the £12.4 million BBSRC/EPSRC-funded Warwick Integrative Synthetic Biology (WISB) Centre. In July 2021, he was appointed Distinguished Research Professor at Monash University, a position he holds alongside the Monash Warwick Alliance Professorship at the University of Warwick. From 2021 to 2025 he was co-director of the $2 million Monash Warwick Alliance AMR Training Program in Emerging Superbug Threats. He is currently a Chief Investigator in the Monash nodes of the $35 million ARC Centre of Excellence for Innovations in Peptide and Protein Science (CIPPS) and the $4.8 million ARC Industrial Transformation Training Centre for Sustainable and Green Economy Manufacturing (SAGE-M).

Challis has co-authored >165 publications on the Chemistry and Biology of bioactive natural products with >26,800 citations and an H-index of 66, and has given >225 invited lectures at international conferences, universities and research institutes. He is listed by ScholarGPS among the top 0.02% and 0.06% of scholars for the impact of his research in natural products and biosynthesis, respectively. He has delivered several named lectures, including the GlaxoSmithKline Lecture at the University of Nottingham (2011), the Amgen Lecture in Organic Chemistry at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (2017), the GE Healthcare Lecture at McGill University (2018), the Bristol Myers Squibb Lecture in Organic Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley (2020), the Andy Derome Lectures in Organic Chemistry at the University of Oxford (2022), the 117th Kitasato Microbial Chemistry Lecture at Kitasato University (2024), and has twice been invited to deliver lectures to the Basel Chemical Society (2011 and 2023). He was one of two overseas speakers at the 8th Tishler-Ōmura symposium (Kitasato University, 2025) celebrating Prof Satoshi Ōmura's 90th birthday and the 10th anniversary of his Nobel Prize.

Challis is the recipient of numerous awards and prizes, including the Kitasato Microbial Chemistry Medal (2025), a Wolfson Research Merit Award (2013-2018) and the Gabor Medal (2009) from the Royal Society (London), the 2017 Interdisciplinary Prize, 2009 Hickinbottom Award, and 2002 Meldola Medal and Prize of the Royal Society of Chemistry, the 2007 Fleming Prize Lecture of the Microbiology Society, the 2007 Wain Medal Lecture of the University of Kent, and the 1998 GlaxoWellcome Postdoctoral Fellowship. In 2011, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC) and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology (FRSB). He has served as a scientific consultant for numerous companies, including Diversa Corporation (USA), Lovells LLP (UK), Syngenta (UK/Switzerland), Mars Petcare (UK), and Harness Racing NSW (Australia). In 2020, he co-founded the University of Warwick spinout company Erebagen Ltd, for which he is currently a consultant and chair of the scientific advisory board.

From 2013-2018, Challis served as a commissioning editor for Natural Product Reports, the premier review journal in the natural products field and currently serves on the editorial advisory boards for JACS Au, the Journal of Industrial Microbiology and Biotechnology, and Antibiotics. He previously served as a member of the editorial advisory boards for Current Drug Discovery Technologies (2008-2014) and Synthetic and Systems Biotechnology (2015-2022). He was a core member of the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council's Committee D (Molecules, Cells and Industrial Biotechnology) from 2012-2015 and has served as a member of advisory committees for industrial biotechnology (2010) and metagenomics (2012-2013) for this research council. He was also a member of the management board for BBSRC's NPRONET network in industrial biotechnology and bioenergy (2014-2019). Since 2024, he has been a co-opted member of the Research Grants Biological Sciences Panel of the Royal Society (London).

Challis was a member of the organising committee for the first five of the Royal Society of Chemistry's highly successful Directing Biosynthesis series of International Conferences and served as the committee chair for the sixth and seventh meetings in the series. He was an organising committee member for the 1st, 2nd, and 4th Society of Industrial Microbiology and Biotechnology Natural Products Discovery and Development in the Post Genomic Era International Conferences in the USA (2015-2023) and was on the scientific committee of the 4th, 5th, and 6th European Conference on Natural Products (2021-2027). In 2018, he became co-director of the John Innes / Rudjer Boskovic Summer Schools in Applied Molecular Microbiology (SSAMM, faculty member since 2007) in Croatia and also served as a Scientific Committee Member for the International Course on Antibiotics and Resistance (ICARe) in France from 2018-2023 (faculty member 2017-2024). In 2026, he was a founding faculty member of the Summer School in Peptide Science (SSIPS) on Heron Island, Australia. He was/is an International Advisory Committee member for IUPAC's 32nd/33rd International Symposia on the Chemistry of Natural Products and 12th/13th International Congress on Biodiversity in Australia (2025)/Japan (2027). In 2025, he served as an expert evaluator of research for the Czech Academy of Sciences, and was appointed a member of the Chemistry Sub-Panel for the UK's 2029 Research Excellence Framework.