Greg Challis graduated with a BSc in Chemistry (1994) from Imperial College London and a DPhil in Organic Chemistry (1998) from the University of Oxford, for research carried out under the supervision of Prof. Sir Jack Baldwin FRS. He carried out postdoctoral research as a Wellcome Trust International Prize Travelling Research Fellow in the Department of Chemistry at Johns Hopkins University, USA, with Prof. Craig Townsend (1998-2000) and in the Department of Genetics at John Innes Centre, UK, with Prof. Keith Chater FRS (2000-2001). In 2001 he took up a lectureship in Chemical Biology in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Warwick. In 2003 he was promoted to Senior Lecturer and in 2006 he was promoted to his present position of Professor of Chemical Biology.

Challis is the recipient of several awards and prizes including the 2009 Gabor Medal of the Royal Society, the 2009 Hickinbottom Award of the Royal Society of Chemistry, the 2007 Fleming Prize Lecture of the Society for General Microbiology, the 2007 Wain Medal Lecture of the University of Kent, the 2002 Meldola Medal and Prize of the Royal Society of Chemistry and the 1998 GlaxoWellcome Postdoctoral Fellowship. In 2011, he was admitted as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC) and elected a Fellow of the Society of Biology (FSB).

Challis is a member of the editorial board for Natural Product Reports and the editorial advisory boards for Current Drug Discovery Technologies, Journal of Industrial Microbiology and Biotechnology, and Antibiotics. He is a core member of the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council's Committee D (Molecules, Cells and Industrial Biotechnology) and has served as a member of advisory committees for industrial biotechnology (2010) and metagenomics (2012-2013) for this research council.