Malcolm Green (chemist)

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Professor Malcolm Green (M. L. H. Green) was born in Eastleigh, Hampshire on 16 April, 1936. He received his BSc degree from Acton Technical College (London University External Regulations) in 1956 and his PhD from Imperial College of Science and Technology in 1959 under the supervision of Professor Sir Geoffrey Wilkinson. He then undertook a post-doctoral research year with Professor Wilkinson before moving to Cambridge University in 1960 as Assistant Lecturer and being elected a Fellow of Corpus Christi College in 1961.

In 1963 he became a Septcentenary Fellow of Inorganic Chemistry at Balliol College and a Departmental Demonstrator at the University of Oxford. In 1965 he was made a Lecturer and he was also a Royal Society Senior Research Fellow in Oxford 1979-86. In 1989 he was appointed Professor of Inorganic Chemistry and Head of the Inorganic Chemistry Laboratory at Oxford and Fellow of St Catherine’s College. In 2004 he became an Emeritus Research Professor and continues research with a substantial group. He was a co-founder of the Oxford Catalysts Group plc in 2006.

Professor Green has held many distinguished visiting positions including: Visiting Professor, Ecole de Chimie and Institute des Substances Naturelles, Paris (1972), AP Sloan Visiting Professor, Harvard University (1975), Sherman Fairchild Visiting Scholar at the California Institute of Technology (1981) and Walter Hieber Gastprofessor, University of Munich, Germany (1991).

Professor Green made pioneering contributions in the earliest days of development of the organometallic chemistry of the transition metals. He was the first to demonstrate the intermolecular insertion of transition metals into carbonhydrogen bonds. He designed and synthesised striking examples of metal-alkyl compounds containing metalhydrogen- carbon bonds which he named “agostic” bonds. In 1990 Professor Green moved into the field of heterogeneous catalysts of hydrocarbon reactions and discovered highly selective metal carbide catalysts for the catalytic Partial Oxidation of Methane. This led to the spin-off company Oxford Catalysts plc. In 1990 Professor Green initiated fundamental studies into the world of carbon nanotubes.

His numerous awards include: from the Royal Society of Chemistry, the Corday-Morgan Medal and Prize in Inorganic Chemistry (1974), Medal in Transition Metal Chemistry(1978), Tilden Lecturship and Prize (1982), Medal in Organometallic Chemistry (1986), Sir Edward Frankland Prize Lecturership (1989), and the Sir Geoffrey Wilkinson Medal and Prize (2000). From the American Chemical Society, the Annual Awards for Inorganic Chemistry (1984) and Organometallic Chemistry (1997). From the Gesellschaft Deutscher Chemiker, the Karl-Ziegler Prize (1992). He became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1985 and received the Davy Medal of the Royal Society in 1995