James A Bull is a Professor in Synthetic Chemistry in the Department of Chemistry. His research focuses on the development of efficient synthetic and catalytic methods to access novel structural motifs and heterocycles of interest in drug discovery.

Professor Bull graduated from the University of Cambridge in 2001 with a First Class Honours MSci degree in Natural Sciences, Chemistry and the Raphael Prize for Organic Chemistry. He then spent a year working at GlaxoSmithKline Stevenage as a Research Scientist in the Medicinal Chemistry Department. He returned to Cambridge in 2003 to undertake PhD research with Professor Steven V Ley. He completed the total synthesis of bisoxazole antifungal natural product bengazole A and analogues. In 2007 he joined the group of Professor André B. Charette as a Postdoctoral Fellow at Université de Montréal, Canada. Here he developed an intramolecular Simmons-Smith cyclopropanation reaction.

In 2009 he began independent research at Imperial College London as a Ramsay Memorial Research Fellow (2009-2011), working in the laboratories of Professor Alan Armstrong. From 2011 to 2015 JB held an EPSRC Career Acceleration Fellowship on "Novel strategies to access chiral heterocycles as potential lead compounds in drug discovery". Prof Bull was then awarded a Royal Society University Research Fellowship (2016-2023). He was promoted to full professor in 2024. JB was awarded RSC/BMOS Young Investigator Award (2015), Eli Lilly OIDD Award for Outstanding Contribution to Compound Screening (2015), Thieme Chemistry Journal Award (2016), the AstraZeneca Prize in Synthetic Chemistry (2021), and The Journal of Organic Chemistry Outstanding Publication of the Year Award (2024).