Professor Cooper obtained his Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry and B.Sc and Honours Degree (1st Class), from the University of Adelaide, Australia. He was a Postdoctoral Fellow with Prof Dudley Williams, at the Cambridge Centre for Molecular Recognition, University of Cambridge, UK; and was a Senior Consultant at Biacore AB (Reporting to CEO) in Sweden. Prof Cooper was also a Postdoctoral Fellow with Prof Chris Abell, Cambridge Centre for Molecular Recognition at the University of Cambridge, UK. He is an NHMRC Australia Fellow and Professor of Chemical Biology at the Institute of Molecular Bioscience, and is an Affiliate Professor in the School of Chemistry and Molecular Biology at The University of Queensland.

Professor Cooper is a scientific entrepreneur with a solid track record of innovation, industry engagement, intellectual property generation, and business development. He was Founder and Managing Director of Cambridge Medical Innovations (now part of Alere Inc.), NHMRC Australia Fellow, Co-founder and CSO of Akubio Ltd (now part of TTP Labtech Ltd.). Professor Cooper has raised >$40m from industrial, government and venture capital sources. He was responsible for positioning of start-up companies and management of multidisciplinary R&D teams with programmes in electronics, physics, materials science, chemistry, microbiology, virology and diagnostics. He is a driver of anti-infective drug discovery programmes with lead compounds pre-clinical and has successfully launched multiple product families to market. Professor Cooper has over 100 publications in high-ranking peer reviewed journals and 20 patents.

bacterial contamination, resistance, diagnostics, near patient testing, screening, drug discovery, surface chemistry, drug design, antibiotics, infectious disease, influenza, dengue, bacteria, materials chemistry, biofilms, infection, food poisoning, superbugs, microbiome, inflammation, immunity, gut bacteria, drug development, Parkinson's, intestinal reperfusion injury, bacterial resistance, gram negative bacteria, gram positive bacteria, Streptococcus pneumonia, Clostridium difficile, legionella, legionnaires' disease, golden staph, COADD, cancer, viral infection, bacterial infection, tuberculosis