Mat Todd was born in Manchester, England. He obtained his PhD in organic chemistry from Cambridge University in 1999, was a Wellcome Trust postdoc at The University of California, Berkeley, a college fellow back at Cambridge University, a lecturer at Queen Mary, University of London and between 2005 and 2018 was at the School of Chemistry, The University of Sydney. He is now Chair of Drug Discovery at University College London. He lives in Greenwich, London, with his wife and two children.