George M. Sheldrick

George Michael Sheldrick, FRS (17 November 1942 – 20 February 2025) was a British chemist who specialised in molecular structure determination. He was one of the most cited workers in the field, having over 280,000 citations as of 2020 and an h-index of 113. He was a professor at the University of Göttingen from 1978 until his retirement in 2011.

Early life Sheldrick was born on 17 November 1942 in Huddersfield, England. He was educated at Huddersfield New College, then an all-boys grammar school. He completed nine O-Levels, six A-Levels, and two S-Levels. At A-Level, he achieved a distinction (the highest grade) in chemistry, mathematics and physics. which is freely available online. In 2011, a graphical user interface for SHELX refinements called ShelXle was released.

Personal life and death On 13 July 1968, Sheldrick married Katherine Elizabeth Herford. Together they had four children.

His younger brother, William S. Sheldrick (1945–2015), was a professor of analytical chemistry at Ruhr University in Bochum, Germany until his retirement in 2010.

Honours 1970 Meldola Medal of the Royal Society of Chemistry 1978 Corday-Morgan Prize of the Royal Society of Chemistry 1988 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft 1999 Carl-Hermann Medal of the German Society for Crystallography 2001 Fellow of the Royal Society 2004 Max Perutz Prize of the European Crystallographic Association 2009 Gregori Aminoff Prize of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences 2011 Ewald Prize of the International Union of Crystallography 2024 George M. Sheldrick Prize The European Crystallographic Association awarded its first award in honour of George Sheldrick.