Alan Carrington

Alan Carrington CBE, FRS (6 January 1934 – 31 August 2013)

Education Carrington was educated at Colfe's School While still a PhD student, Carrington spent a year as a research fellow at the University of Minnesota,

Career and research Carrington was a Fellow of Downing College, Cambridge between 1959 and 1967, where he worked closely with Christopher Longuet-Higgins, and became assistant director of research in 1963. In 1967 Carrington returned to the University of Southampton as one of the youngest professors of chemistry in Britain at the time, during which his laboratory was in the (then) Physical Chemistry Laboratories on South Parks Road. While at Oxford Carrington was a Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford,

Carrington's later work was concerned with examining the structure of molecular ions in energy regions close to their dissociation limits. This work on the spectroscopy of simple molecular ions provided accurate measurements with which theoretical calculations could usefully be compared. In particular, his work on the simplest diatomic and triatomic molecules gave rise to measurements that have not yet been matched by theoretical calculations.

Awards and honours

Carrington was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1971, and received the Faraday Lectureship Prize in 1986 and the Davy Medal in 1992. He also became a Foreign Associate of the US National Academy of Sciences in 1994. He served as President of the Faraday Division of the Royal Society of Chemistry in 1997-1998. He was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1999 and an Honorary Fellow of Downing College, Cambridge in 2000.