Dr Clare Bakewell

Dr Clare Bakewell is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Chemistry at King's College London. She received her MChem degree from the University of Leeds in 2010 and completed her PhD at Imperial College London under the supervision of Professors Charlotte Williams and Nick Long. Following her PhD, she worked at Econic Technologies as part of an EPSRC Doctoral Prize Fellowship and later conducted postdoctoral research at Imperial College London with Professor Mark Crimmin. In 2018, she became a Ramsay Memorial Fellow at University College London before joining King's College London as a Lecturer in 2021. Her research focuses on the exploration of electronically interesting main-group compounds, high-energy materials, and main-group metals in catalysis.

Clare Bakewell King's research focuses on polymers, organometallics, and inorganic chemistry, with an emphasis on the development of metal-based initiators for ring-opening polymerization of cyclic esters. Her work explores the synthesis and reactivity of phosphasalen and quinolinolato complexes of yttrium, scandium, and aluminium, which exhibit high iso-selectivity in lactide polymerization. She investigates the catalytic activation of renewable resources for polymer synthesis and the reactivity of main group metals in breaking carbon–fluorine bonds. Her studies also examine the behavior of aluminium (I) and magnesium (I) species in reactions involving fluoroalkenes, fluoroarenes, and dienes, contributing to the understanding of reversible alkene binding and C–H activation mechanisms.