Rate My Professor Paul Popelier

Paul Popelier is Professor of Computational Chemistry in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Manchester. He holds a Licentiaat in Chemistry and a PhD in Structural Chemistry from the University of Antwerp in Belgium. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship at McMaster University in Canada, served as an HCM Fellow at the University of Cambridge, and was awarded a DSc from UMIST. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC).

Popelier leads the Quantum Chemical Topology Group, which he founded in 1997. His research centres on Quantum Chemical Topology, an approach rooted in the quantum theory of atoms in molecules that analyses the topology of the electron density and related functions to provide rigorous chemical insight. His work spans computational and theoretical chemistry, including applications in high-resolution X-ray crystallography, biochemistry, intermolecular interactions, force field design, molecular dynamics simulations, and related areas. He has authored or co-authored numerous peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, and books in these fields. Popelier’s contributions have helped establish the group as a leading centre for research in quantum chemical topology, with the in-house program MORPHY distributed to laboratories worldwide.