Professor Robert Britton obtained his B. Sc. from the University of Waterloo in 1996 working with Professor Victor Snieckus, and his Ph. D. in natural product isolation, structural elucidation, and total synthesis from the University of British Columbia under the supervision of Professors Edward Piers and Raymond Anderson. He spent two years at the University of Cambridge with Professor Ian Paterson as an NSERC PDF then joined the Process Research Group at Merck as a Senior Scientist before starting an independent career at Simon Fraser University in 2005. He is a Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research Career Scholar and his research program focuses on the concise synthesis of structurally and stereochemically complex natural products and the discovery of new synthetic methods to support drug discovery and development.