Dr Thomas J. Colacot

Thomas J. Colacot is a Research and Development Manager in Homogeneous Catalysis (Global) of Johnson Matthey’s Catalysis and Chiral Technologies business unit. He has been leading the homogeneous catalysis and organometallics effort at Johnson Matthey since 1995, providing technical solutions to global pharmaceutical and fine chemical organisations. He has successfully commercialised several new products from gram to multi-kilogram scale and transferred the process to the US, UK and India. Dr Colacot has expertise in making cross-coupling technology viable for applications in drug synthesis, OLED and liquid crystals, and has played a significant role in taking cross-coupling to the next level for industries to practice via new generation practical catalysts.

Dr Colacot holds a PhD in Chemistry from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras (1989) and an MBA from Penn State University, USA (2004). He did post doctoral and teaching work at University of Alabama at Birmingham (1989-1992) in main group organometallics, was an Assistant Professor at Florida A&M University (1992), and a Research Associate at Southern Methodist University in the area of Ziegler-Natta Catalysis on an ATP/AMOCO program with Professor Hosmane (1992-1995). He occasionally teaches a graduate course on “Industrial Applications of Organometallic Chemistry” at Rutgers University, Camden, New Jersey, USA, where he is a visiting Faculty member.

He is a coauthor of around 80 articles which include reviews, peer-reviewed publications, book chapters and patents. He has given over 250 presentations, including plenary or invited talks, at national and international conferences, universities and chemical and pharmaceutical companies. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, former Chair of the South Jersey ACS Program, a Life Member of the Alabama Academy of Sciences, an external PhD thesis examiner to several Indian Institutes of Technologies and to the National Chemical Laboratory, Pune, India, and a regular peer reviewer for many of the major chemistry Journals. In 2012 he was awarded the RSC’s Applied Catalysis Award for exceptional contributions to the development and availability of ligands and catalysts crucial for the advancement of metal-catalysed synthetic organic chemistry.