Richard J. Payne graduated from the University of Canterbury, New Zealand in 2002. His final year project was supervised by Professor Andrew Abell and involved the synthesis and protein conjugation studies of vitamin K analogues. In 2003 he was awarded a Gates Scholarship to undertake his PhD at the Department of Chemistry, University of Cambridge (Downing College) under the supervision of Professor Chris Abell (Wikipedia). His PhD research entailed the design, synthesis and evaluation of inhibitors of enzymes on, and downstream of the shikimate pathway. After a short postdoctoral tenure at the University of Cambridge (Feb-June 2006), Richard moved to The Scripps Research Institute under the auspices of a Lindemann Postdoctoral Fellowship and the guidance of Professor Chi-Huey Wong (Wikipedia). Here, he was involved in the development of new methods for the synthesis of glycopeptides and glycoproteins. In 2008 he moved to the University of Sydney where he is currently and Australian Research Council Future Fellow and Professor of Organic Chemistry and Chemical Biology within the School of Chemistry.