Professor Penny Brothers

Professor Penny Brothers is in the School of Chemical Sciences at the University of Auckland. Penny was born and grew up in Auckland, New Zealand, and completed BSc and MSc(Hons) degrees in chemistry at the University of Auckland. In 1979 she was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship and set off for Stanford University to begin a PhD in chemistry under the supervision of Professor Jim Collman. Her PhD thesis, and much of her subsequent research work, has centered around the chemistry of porphyrin complexes. In 1986 she returned to Auckland and spent two years working as a postdoctoral fellow with Professor Warren Roper in the Department of Chemistry, focussing on organometallic chemistry.

In 1988 she took up her current academic position at the University of Auckland, and was promoted to Professor in 2009. She has been a visiting scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory (2003, 2005, 2007) and a visiting professor at the University of California at Davis (1993), the University of Heidelberg (2003), the University of Burgundy (2004, 2006), the University of Münster (2010), Peking University (2011), the University of California at Berkeley (2014) and the University of Tromsø (2016-2017). She was awarded a Fulbright Senior Scholar Award in 2007 and served as President of the New Zealand Institute of Chemistry in 2017.  She is an Associate Editor of Chemical Communications.

Her current research brings together her interests in porphyrin chemistry, the main group elements and organometallic chemistry. She investigates how porphyrin and corrole ligands can be used to modify the chemistry of elements such as boron and bismuth, and has a broad interest in coordination chemistry of the transition metals and main group elements. She has a number of research collaborations in NZ and internationally. 

For more information see Professor Penny Brothers' University of Auckland webpage.