Malcolm Green (1936 – 2020)
St. Catherine’s College is saddened to share the news that Professor Malcolm Green, Emeritus Fellow of St Catherine’s and Emeritus Professor of Inorganic Chemistry at the University of Oxford, passed away on 24 July at the age of 84.
Professor Green graduated from Acton Technical College with a Bachelor of Science in 1956 and gained his PhD from Imperial College in 1959. Following a postdoctoral research year at Imperial he moved to the University of Cambridge in 1960 as Assistant Lecturer and was appointed a Fellow of Corpus Christi, Cambridge in 1961. In 1963 he came to Oxford where he remained until his retirement.
His time at Oxford began as a Septcentenary Fellow of Inorganic Chemistry at Balliol and a Departmental Demonstrator. He was made a University Lecturer in 1965 and between 1979 and 1986 was a Royal Society Senior Research Fellow. He became a Fellow of St Catherine’s in 1989 on his appointment as Professor of Inorganic Chemistry and Head of the University’s Inorganic Chemistry Laboratory.
During his time at Oxford, he held a number of visiting positions in other institutions, including as the Alfred P. Sloan Visiting Professor at Harvard and as the Sherman Fairchild Visiting Scholar at Caltech. He was elected as Fellow of the Royal Society in 1985 and subsequently received many accolades including, in 1995, the Royal Society’s Davy Medal in recognition of his contribution to organometallic chemistry with particular application to catalytic reactions and, in 1999, the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Sir Geoffrey Wilkinson Award for outstanding contributions to pure or applied research in the field of organometallic chemistry.
Although he will be best remembered as an organometallic chemist, in the latter stages of his career he also made significant contributions to the chemistry of C60 “Buckyballs” and single-walled carbon nanotubes. Following his retirement from his chair in 2003 he continued his research, co-founding the company Oxford Catalysts in 2006.