Chemistry International
Vol. 21, No. 4
July 1999
40th
IUPAC Council Meeting
Free University,
Berlin, Germany,
13-14 August 1999
Election
of Officers and Bureau Members: Bureau
President
Vice President
Past-President
Secretary General
TreasurerVacancy
BureauFour Vacancies (Minimum)
..Prof. S. Chandrasekaran
..Prof. Pavel Kratochvil
..Prof. G. Jeffrey Leigh
.. Prof. Nicole J. Moreau
..Prof. Oleg M. Nefedov
..Prof. Hitoshi Ohtaki
..Prof. Gerhard M. Schneider
..Prof. Pieter S. Steyn
Prof. G . Jeffery Leigh (UK)
Prof. G . Jeffery Leigh |
Prof. Leigh was born on 4 September 1934, and is married with
two children.
Education and Career: Studied at University of London,
King's College, graduating as top student in 1956, and taking his Ph.D. in
silicon chemistry three years later. Appointed Lecturer in Chemistry in the
Faculty of the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology
(UMIST) in 1959, where he remained for six years, though one was spent on
a sabbatical year as a CIBA fellow with Prof. E. O. Fischer at the University
of Munich, Germany.
In 1965, he moved to the University of Sussex, to join the Nitrogen
Fixation Unit recently established by Prof. Joseph Chatt. As a coordination
chemist, he studied the complex chemistry of dinitrogen as a model for the
chemistry of nitrogenases. Under his direct supervision, the chemistry group
at the unit became the leading laboratory on dinitrogen chemistry, and Prof.
Leigh has now published some 250 scientific papers and supervised about 25
doctoral students. He is probably the world's leading authority on dinitrogen
complex chemistry. He left the Nitrogen Fixation Laboratory as Deputy Director
in 1994 to become the first professor of environmental science in the University
of Sussex. His work has been widely recognized, not least by Her Majesty the
Queen by the award of an OBE for services to science. He has lectured in universities
and at conferences all over the world, in English or in French, German, or
Spanish when appropriate.
Related Professional Activities: Prof. Leigh has been
involved in editing and publishing for many years, and he has acted as a deputy
editor of the Journal of Organometallic Chemistry, and as Chairman
of the Editorial Board of Dalton Transactions. He has also served the
boards of Inorganic Biochemistry, Inorganica Chimica Acta, and Reaction
Kinetics and Catalysis Lectures. Within the Royal Society of Chemistry,
Prof. Leigh was instrumental in setting up the current system of editorial
boards, and was founder chairman of the Inorganic Biochemistry Discussion
Group. He has also been Vice President of the Dalton Division of the Royal
Society of Chemistry.
IUPAC Offices and Assignments: Prof. Leigh has been
involved in IUPAC activities for about 25 years, and has accumulated a wealth
of experience at all levels of the organization. He joined the Commission
for the Nomenclature of Inorganic Chemistry in the late 1960s, and served
as associate and titular member before becoming secretary for eight years.
His major achievement was editing the 1990 version of Nomenclature of Inorganic
Chemistry. Subsequently, he moved to the Inorganic Division Committee,
where he has been Secretary and Vice President for four-year terms and has
recently finished a two-year term as President. He is editor of the recently
published IUPAC book Principles of Chemical Nomenclature, written jointly
with H. A. Favre and W. V. Metanomski, and was the IUPAC representative responsible
for arranging the compromise proposal for the names of elements 104-109 that
has now been adopted. He also has collected the material to be used in the
adjudication over the names of elements 110-112.