Vernon Charles Gibson CB FRS (born 15 November 1958) is a British scientist who served as Chief Scientific Adviser at the Ministry of Defence between 2012 and 2016.^[2] He was reappointed to the MoD CSA role in May 2023. He is visiting professor at Imperial College London and the University of Oxford, Honorary Professor at the University of Manchester.^[3] He delivered the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) Prince Philip Lecture on Military Education in Nov 2023.

Gibson was born in Grantham, Lincolnshire and educated at The King's School, Grantham followed by the University of Sheffield where he studied Chemistry and graduated with a First Class Special Honours degree in 1980.^{[citation needed]} He was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy degree from the University of Oxford in 1983 for research supervised by Malcolm L.H. Green.^[4]

After his DPhil, Gibson spent two years as a NATO postdoctoral research fellow with John E. Bercaw at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).^{[citation needed]}

In 2017, Gibson was appointed Executive Director of the BP International Centre for Advanced Materials and became its Executive Chair in 2021.^[5] He was Chief Scientific Adviser to the Ministry of Defence from 2012 to 2016 and Chief Chemist at BP plc from 2008 to 2012. Prior to this he was the Sir Edward Frankland Professor of Inorganic Chemistry at Imperial College London where, following foundations laid in the Chemistry Department at the University of Durham, he developed an international reputation for his fundamental studies on metal complexes and discoveries of new catalyst systems for the production of commercially relevant polymers.

Gibson is married to Sue Gibson (née Thomas).^[1] They have two grown-up children.