Rob Batey was born and raised in what is now a post-industrial district of England, known as "The Black Country", located in the midlands. He graduated from Oxford University with a B.A. degree in 1988. He learned the fundamentals of organic chemistry and reaction mechanisms from Dr. Dennis Meakins and pursued a thesis project with Prof. George Fleet. He then escaped to the Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine in South Kensington, London. There he worked with Prof. Willie B. Motherwell, receiving a Ph.D. degree in 1992 on the synthetic applications of free-radical rearrangements and samarium diiodide chemistry. As a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania with Prof. Jeff D. Winkler, he worked on approaches toward the synthesis of the anticancer drug taxol, including the use of photochemical rearrangements and intramolecular Diels-Alder reactions. Following a medicinal chemistry position (oncology) at the Upjohn Company in Michigan, he joined the faculty at the University of Toronto in 1994. He is a Full Professor in the Department of Chemistry and is a Co-Director of the Acceleration Consortium's Medicinal Chemistry Self Driving Lab (SDL). From 2009–2013 he served as the Associate Chair of Undergraduate Studies and from 2013–2023 as the Chair of the Department of Chemistry.
His research interests are in the area of organic synthesis and its application to biology and medicine. He is the recipient of several awards including a Faculty of Arts and Science Outstanding Teaching Award, the Canadian Society of Chemistry (CSC) Merck-Frosst Centre for Therapeutic Research Award, Merck Academic Development Program Award, Premier's Research Excellence Award, the Bio-Méga/Boehringer Ingelheim Young Investigator Award for Organic Chemistry, and the CSC Astra Pharma Award. Outside of the University and scribbling chemical structures, he enjoys spending time with his family and the family dog. He enjoys eclectic music, movies, art, photography, and islands of all sorts. Finally, he suffers from afar the exasperating trials of England's football (soccer) team. His favourite cultural figures are the grand inquisitors "Cardinal Ximinez, Biggles and Fang".
Email: rob.batey@utoronto.ca
Office: LM 365
Tel: 416-978-5059