Dominic Campopiano is Chair of Industrial Biocatalysis in the School of Chemistry at the University of Edinburgh. He studied chemistry at the University of Glasgow (1984–88) then carried out his PhD studies in Chemistry at the University of Edinburgh under the supervision of Prof. Bob Baxter (1988–91). After post-doctoral stints with Prof. Bill Shaw in Biochemistry at the University of Leicester and in Chemistry at Edinburgh, he was appointed to a lectureship in 1998. He was promoted through the ranks of senior lecturer and reader before taking up his chair in 2015. He held a Royal Society of Edinburgh/Scottish Executive Personal Research Fellowship (2006) and was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC) in 2018.

He has had a long-standing interest in natural product biosynthesis and exploring the pathways and enzymes that catalyse their production. These enzymes can then be used as biocatalysts to develop greener/more sustainable routes to commodity and high value chemicals. Over 25 years he has developed many fruitful collaborations with a number of experts from different fields that include microbiology, human genetics and structural biology. He has led research programmes that have investigated the structures and mechanisms of key enzymes from sphingolipid (SL), antibiotic and vitamin biosynthetic pathways. Research has focused on characterisation of the first enzyme in the SL pathway, serine palmitoyltransferase (SPT). More recently he has investigated the biosynthesis of ceramides in various microbes to understand their role(s) in bacterial and mammalian metabolism.