Professor Les Field

Professor Les Field is a Professor of Chemistry at UNSW.

He served as Senior Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Senior Vice-President of the University of New South Wales from February 2016 to December 2017.

Professor Les Field is a graduate of the University of Sydney (PhD in Chemistry in 1979) then, following Postdoctoral Fellowships at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles and then at Oxford he took up an academic post at the University of Sydney in 1982.  He was awarded a DSc in 1991 by the University of Sydney.  He was Head of Chemistry at the University of Sydney from 1997 to 2001 and an elected member of the Senate of the University of Sydney from 2003 to 2005.  He was appointed as a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) in 2011 for his services to Chemistry and to Higher Education in Australia.

He was the Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research) at UNSW from 2005 to 2016 and Acting Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Research) at the University of Sydney from 2001 to 2003.  His main areas of research are organometallic chemistry, catalysis and NMR spectroscopy.  He is the author of more than 200 scientific papers and 4 text books.  He was the recipient of the Organic Chemistry Medal of the Royal Australian Chemical Institute in 1994 and was elected as a Fellow of the Australia Academy of Science in 1996.  He has served as a member of the Council of the Royal Australian Chemical Institute (2004-8) and he served on the Council of the Australian Academy of Science (2004-6 and from 2012-2016).  He was the Secretary for Science Policy in the Australian Academy of Science from 2012-2016.

Academic Awards include:  The Rennie Medal (1983); The Edgeworth David Medal (1986); The Organic Chemistry Medal (1992), the Centenary of Federation Medal in 2003 and the RACI Leighton Medal in 2010.

Professor Field was a director of the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute Pty Ltd (2012-20); He was chairman of UNSW Innovations (previously NewSouth Innovations Pty Ltd) from 2006 to 2016.  He has been a director of Australian Technology Park Innovations Pty Ltd; as well as Uniseed management Pty Ltd.  He is currently a Director and Executive Chairman of small spin-out company from UNSW - Flame Security International (FSI) which is developing and commercializing a suite of fire-resistant materials as well as materials for fire-fighting for industry applications, for domestic situations and for fighting bushfires.   

Research Interests

Organometallic Chemistry

• Transition metal catalysis in Organic Synthesis
• The Organometallic Chemistry of coordinated dinitrogen - nitrogen fixation
• The Organometallic Chemistry of carbon dioxide - transformations of CO₂
• C-H Bond Activation and functionalisation by transition metals - the chemistry of transition metal hydrides and metal alkyls
• Metal-to-metal communication between metals embedded in an organic framework
• Transition metal acetylides, Organometallic Polymers and New Materials

NMR Spectroscopy

• Identification of organic and organometallic compounds using NMR spectroscopy
• Advanced multinuclear NMR spectroscopy