Professor Richard Templer holds a joint appointment with the Department of Chemistry and the Grantham Institute. He is the Director of Development for Chemistry and the Director of Innovation at the Grantham Institute. He is the current Hofmann Chair in Chemistry and is a member of the London Sustainable Development Commission and advisory body to the Mayor of London. Prompted by the outcome of collaborative research on biorefining he led, Professor Templer was part of a successful bid to the European Institute for Innovation and Technology to create a Climate Knowledge Innovation Community. In 2010 he became the Director of Climate-KIC UK and Director of Education. He and his team created a programme of education to inspire climate innovators and entrepreneurs and developed and ran the UK Cleantech Accelerator. The education programme has now trained almost 2,000 students in the arts of environmentally sustainable innovation and entrepreneurship and the accelerator has graduated 50 new cleantech businesses that have between them raised $180M in investment since 2012.
