Ronald Gillespie

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Ronald J. Gillespie, C.M., (August 21, 1924), a chemistry professor at McMaster University, specializes in the field of Molecular Geometry in chemistry. Therefore, most of his research is theoretical. It was announced on the Governor General's website on June 29, 2007 that he is to be awarded the Order of Canada.^[1]

He was educated at the University of London obtaining a B. Sc. in 1945, a Ph. D. in 1949 and a D. Sc. in 1957. He was Assistant Lecturer and then Lecturer in the Department of Chemistry at University College London in England from 1950 to 1958. He moved to McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada in 1958 and is now emeritus professor there. He was elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society of Canada in 1965.

Ronald has done extensive work on expanding the idea of the Valence Shell Electron Pair Repulsion (VSEPR) model of Molecular Geometry, which he developed with Ronald Nyholm, and setting the rules for assigning numbers and such. He has written several books on this VSEPR topic in chemistry. Gillespie has also done extensive work on interpreting the covalent radius of fluorine. The covalent radius of most atoms is found by taking half the distance between the bond lengths of two atoms of the same kind through a single bond in the neutral molecule. Calculating the covalent radius for fluorine is more difficult because of its high electronegativity compared to its small atomic radius size. Ronald Gillespie’s work on the bond length of fluorine focuses on theoretically determining the covalent radius of fluorine by examining its covalent radius when it is attached to several different atoms.

[edit] Publications

Chemical Bonding and Molecular Geometry: From Lewis to Electron Densities (Topics in Inorganic Chemistry) by Ronald J. Gillespie and Paul L. A. Popelier
Atoms, Molecules and Reactions: An Introduction to Chemistry by Ronald J. Gillespie
Chemistry by Ronald J. Gillespie, David Humphreys, Colin Laird, and E. A. Robinson