Professor Jeremy Frey

Jeremy's teaching interests cover a broad range of physical and environmental chemistry together with areas of data science. Jeremy is very interested in new ways of teaching, learning and dissemination of chemical ideas, and is currently looking at how AI will change the nature of the way we teach Chemistry.

Jeremy Frey obtained his DPhil on experimental and theoretical aspects of van der Waals complexes, in the Physical Chemistry Laboratory, University of Oxford, funder the supervision of Prof. Brian Howard.  He followed this with a NATO/SERC fellowship at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory with Prof. Yuan T. Lee.  In 1984 Jeremy took up a lectureship at the University of Southampton, where he is now Professor of Physical Chemistry and Head of the Computational Systems Chemistry Group.

Jeremy’s experimental research probes molecular organization in environments from single molecules to liquid interfaces using laser spectroscopy from the IR to soft X-rays. In parallel he investigates how e-Science infrastructure helps to make a smart and intelligent laboratory, where people, equipment and computers can all work well together.  This blends into his computational and theoretical side he has a focus on chemical informatics and the application of novel mathematical approaches, such as Topological Data Analyst (TDA)  and computational advances in Machine Learning (ML), to chemical modelling.

Jeremy is an enthusiastic supporter of interdisciplinary research, combining theory, computation and experiment within chemistry, and though the UK e-Science programme his interests grew into the wider computational and computing community together with industrial research.  In his role in the Digital Economy programme through the IT as a Utility Network challenge area, and now the Internet of Food Things (www.foodchain.ac.uk), he addressed the full breadth of interdisciplinary research connecting social, physical, and life sciences in a trans-sectorial context bridging academic, commercial, and governmental areas. Jeremy is now the PI of the EPSRC Network+ on Artificial Intelligence and Automated Scientific Discovery (www.ai3sd.org) encouraging the collaborations at the cutting edge of AI and Chemical Sciences. 

Jeremy is involved with the national and international chemical societies though the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) and Society for the chemical Industry (SCI), and in IUPAC Jeremy has been a member of DIv 1 Committee and CPCDS, formally Chair of Commission I.1, advocating engagement with the digital world and leads the 5^th Edition Green Book project.

Prizes

• RSC Chemical Information and Computer Applications Group, Winner of the 2021 Inspirational Committee Award (2021)