John Derek Woollins is a chemist who was Provost of Khalifa University, Abu Dhabi having previously been Vice Principal (Research and Innovation), Provost of St Leonard's College, at the University of St Andrews. Woollins' reagent is named after him. He has been a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry since 1994 and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh since 2002. Prior to being appointed Vice Principal of Research, Woollins was the Head of Chemistry for two terms. He has been a visiting professor at various institutes. Early life and education Woollins grew up in Cleethorpes, the second youngest of four sons. He was educated at Clee Grammar School for Boys, where he attended the sixth form. He then attended the University of East Anglia graduating with a BSc in 1976 and PhD in 1979. Career He did postdoc work under William R Cullen at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, before working with Barnett Rosenberg in Michigan. His work with Rosenberg included work on Cisplatin, an early chemotherapy drug. He came up with a procedure to verify the concentration of transplatin, a harmful isomer, was less than 1ppm. He returned to the United Kingdom where he worked under Norman Greenwood at the University of Leeds before becoming a lecturer at Imperial College London. He became a professor at Loughborough University prior to joining the University of St Andrews. Woollins has been a visiting professor at Australian National University, University of Auckland and most recently Nanjing University of Technology. Initially Woollins was Head of Research of the School of Chemistry at St.Andrews University, before two successful terms as Head of Chemistry. After this he was appointed Vice Principal of Research, a post he held for five years. From September 2019 he became Provost at Khalifa University in Abu Dhabi; he left this post in April 2020. Academic Work Professor Derek Woollins is known for his work on the synthesis, determination of structure and applications of new molecules made with main group elements of the Periodic Table, where his work has focused on Sulfur, Selenium and Tellurium. He has also done work on Nitrogen and Phosphorus. Major achievements have been the development of rational synthetic routes, the preparation of molecular systems with unusual structures and properties and the development of main group compounds as reagents for organic chemistry. His work on sulfur-nitrogen rings and cages, as well as