David Parker grew up in the North-East of England and graduated with a First in Chemistry from Oxford in the summer of ‘78. After a D.Phil. with John M Brown on mechanistic studies in asymmetric catalysis, in 1980 he took up a NATO fellowship to work with Jean-Marie Lehn in Strasbourg. He returned to Durham in January 1982 to a Lectureship in Chemistry and was promoted to a Chair in 1992. He received the RSC Hickinbottom Fellowship for 1988/9, the Corday-Morgan Medal and Prize in 1989, the ICI Prize in Organic Chemistry in 1991, an RSC Interdisciplinary Award in 1996, a Royal Society Leverhulme Trust Senior Research Fellowship (1998/9), the inaugural IBC Award for Supramolecular Science and Technology in 2000, the first RSC award for Supramolecular Chemistry in 2002, a Tilden Lectureship and Silver Medal in 2003, the Ludwig Mond Medal in 2011 and the triennial Lecoq de Boisbaudran award for rare earth science in 2012. In 2002, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London, and in 2014 was recognized as a RISE Fellow by EPSRC. He has twice served as Chairman of Durham Chemistry and held an ERC Advanced Investigator Grant (2011-16).