Graham Richards, Oxford head of chemistry whose business flair earnt the university millions

Yahoo

11-03-2025

​Professor Graham Richards, who has died aged 85, was chairman of the chemistry department of Oxford University, a veteran fellow of Brasenose College and a pioneer in the commercialisation of science who advised would-be entrepreneurs to become millionaires without losing their souls.
In 1988, with his former student Tony Marchington and others, Richards co-founded Oxford Molecular, a drug-design software house, oiling the wheels, as he recalled in a memoir, 50 Years at Oxford (2011), by entertaining investors in the Brasenose Senior Common Room, 'complete with candelabra, and especially snuff being an excellent public relations boost'.
The company thrived, being floated in 1994 and earning £10 million for the university as it acquired the French c​ompany Biostructure and built partnerships with companies such as Glaxo Wellcome. Worth £450 million at the height of the biotech boom of the late 1990s, Oxford Molecular was sold for £70 million in 2000 to Pharmacopeia Inc, and is now part of Accelrys.
In 2006 the Times Higher Education Supplement listed Richards among 12 academic 'super-earners' in the UK. Yet commercial success never went to his head, and as well as maintaining an impressive academic output – with 16 books and more than 350 papers in molecular spectroscopy, theoretical chemistry and biophysics – he remained an institution at Brasenose, where he had arrived in 1958 to do a BSc in chemistry and never really left.
Described by one college principal as 'a convivial companion, combining a strong c​haracter with high administrative ability and a pleasant personality', Richards served as senior tutor from 1985 to 1990, and for a while as vice-principal. But he never neglected the teaching part of his role; the bioethicist Lady (Ruth) Deech observed that he represented 'the best of an older, more relaxed Oxford where colleges and tutors could spot potential in candidates and were not too hidebound by grades and scoring grids.'
And he led by example: in 2018 it was reported that six staff in his department had become millionaires without giving up their academic work.
At Brasenose, Richards played a central role in 1974 in the college becoming one of the first five in Oxford to admit women – a huge cultural shift from a few years before, when women were not allowed at high table, and a change that owed much to his skills of advocacy. He died during the celebrations of 50 years of women at the college.
William Graham Richards was born on October 1 1939 in Hoylake on the Wirral, to Percy Richards and Gwendoline, née Evans. Both parents were of Welsh extraction, his mother, one of 14 children, having left school aged 11. Although he contracted polio as a child, Graham won a state scholarship to Birkenhead School.
He originally applied to read physics at Brasenose but accepted an offer to read chemistry. In his memoir he recalled that he was 'not a particularly diligent student and spent most afternoons involved in some sport or another and much of my evenings at parties'. None the less he gained a Senior Hulme Scholarship and graduated with a First in 1961.
After taking a DPhil in 1964, he moved to Balliol as a junior research fellow, but returned to Brasenose with a tutorial fellowship two years later.
Richards's scientific interests included lasers and pharmacology, molecular orbital calculations and spin orbit coupling in diatomic-doubling. He was one of the first academics to spot the potential of computers, recalling in his memoir: 'I realised perhaps out of laziness that there was this new-fangled thing called a computer which could do integrals numerically.'
There was, though, nothing lazy about Richards, and as well as his academic work, he stood unsuccessfully as a Conservative candidate in local council elections, campaigning in the Blackbird Leys estate in an open-top Triumph Herald. He served on the university General Board of Faculties and its successor, the University Council. Appointed professor in 1996, he was chairman of the chemistry department from 1997 to 2006 and raised £64.5 million, some of it from the Wellcome Trust, for a new chemistry building​.
As one of the first advocates for the commercialisation of academic science, Richards chaired the Oxford University Industry Committee and served on the board of Isis Innovation (now Oxford University Innovation) for 20 years. He was a non-e​xecutive director of several other Oxford spin-outs and was involved in Oxford Drug Design until just before his death. His publications included Spin-outs: Creating Business from University Intellectual Property (2009).
Richards was a council member of the Royal Society of Chemistry and of the Royal Institution, and was appointed CBE in 2001. He received numerous awards, though he had to wait until 2018 to be elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, some speculating that his candidacy might have been held back by old-fashioned prejudice against the commercialisation of science.
In 1970 Graham Richards married Jessamy Kershaw, who died in 1988, and in 1996 he married Mary Phillips. She survives him with his two sons, and two stepdaughters and a stepson.
Graham Richards, born October 1 1939, died February 11 2025
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