Professor Cooper is a materials chemist at the University of Liverpool and leads an internationally recognised group whose portfolio covers porous materials, porous organic cages, microporous materials, clathrates, polymers, nanoparticles, nanomaterials, high throughput methods
After his Ph.D., he held an 1851 Fellowship and a Royal Society NATO Fellowship at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA, working on polymerisation reactions and phase transfer processes in supercritical CO2. He then held a Ramsay Memorial Research Fellowship at the Melville Laboratory for Polymer Synthesis in Cambridge. In 1998, he was awarded a Royal Society University Research Fellowship and joined Liverpool in January 1999, where he now holds a Personal Chair.
His main research interests are polymeric materials, supercritical fluids, microporous materials, hydrogen storage, metal nanoparticles, organometallics, emulsion-templated materials, and high-throughput materials methodology. He is the founding Director of the Centre for Materials Discovery and the Materials Innovation Factory
The Cooper groups activities in the Digital Innovation Facility are focussed on laboratory automation and the use of artificial intelligence and robotics to deliver the lab of the future.