Professor Bill Dawson

Pro-Chancellor

Professor Dawson is currently a visiting Professor at the University of Nottingham and has held that role at the New University of Lisbon, UCL School of Pharmacy and Sheffield Hallam University over the last two decades.

He trained as a pharmacist and after community experience in Northumberland he completed a PhD in the field of chronic inflammation and joined Eli Lilly and Company as a pharmacologist in their laboratories in Surrey after a period at the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology in Massachusetts, USA.

He became Director of Research in 1977 and Director of Technology Acquisition in 1991. He has published more than 100 papers and his team were responsible for the discovery of olanzapine, a potent antipsychotic which was successfully introduced across the world by the Company.

Over the last few years, since retiring from Eli Lilly he has been a director of or adviser to many small companies and still very much enjoys that role. He has sat on many Research Council Committees for MRC, EPSRC and BBSRC and was most recently on panels for the Future Leaders Fellowship scheme run by UKRI. He was Chair of the Academy of Pharmaceutical Sciences from 2012-2015

He has been associated with De Montfort University in a variety of roles initially as a scientific adviser then as a Board member where he became Chair from 2008-2011.