Professor Ian Fleming graduated from the University of Cambridge in 1959, obtained his PhD in 1962, and a Research Fellowship from 1962-64. He spent a post-doctoral year with R. B. Woodward at Harvard (1963-64), and then spent the rest of his career in the University of Cambridge, with sabbatical visits to teach at the University of Wisconsin, Madison (1980) and at Harvard (1990). He is well known in the organic chemistry world having been elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1993 for his contributions to research in synthetic organic chemistry, with a special emphasis on the uses of organosilicon chemistry. After formal retirement from research in 2002, he has been writing, and continuing to carry out tutorial teaching in Pembroke College. From 2012 to 2018 he taught a one-semester course at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign.