Malcolm Green

Malcolm Leslie Hodder Green (16 April 1936 – 24 July 2020) was Professor of Inorganic Chemistry at the University of Oxford. He made many contributions to organometallic chemistry.

Education Born in Eastleigh, Hampshire, he was educated at Denstone College

After his PhD, Green undertook a postdoctoral research year with Wilkinson before moving to the University of Cambridge in 1960 as Assistant Lecturer and being appointed a Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge in 1961. In 1963 he was appointed a Septcentenary Fellow of Inorganic Chemistry at Balliol College, Oxford 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, Oxford. In 2004, he became an Emeritus Research Professor. He was a co-founder of the Oxford Catalysts Group plc in 2006. themes that he pursued throughout his career. Many of his early contributions focused on the chemistry of molybdocene dihydride ((C5H5)2MoH2) and the related tungsten derivative. These compounds were shown to engage in many reactions related to C-H bond activation. The word was suggested to him by Jasper Griffin, professor of Classics at Balliol, whom Green asked for an appropriate Greek word to describe the close bonding phenomenon. This work would later lead to the so-called "modified Green-Rooney mechanism" for Ziegler–Natta catalysis, wherein agostic interactions guide the stereochemistry of the alkene insertion step. This proposal found wide acceptance. His work on metal carbide catalysts led to the corporate spin-off company Oxford Catalysts plc, which became Velocys.

Green developed the covalent bond classification (CBC) method in 1995 to describe the ligands and bonding in coordination and organometallic complexes.

Towards the end of his career Green's interests shifted to include studies of carbon nanotubes, developing methods to "uncap" (open) them, and investigating their filling with metals and with salts.

Awards and honours His numerous awards include:

1972: Awarded the Corday-Morgan medal in Inorganic Chemistry by the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) 1977: Medal in Transition Metal Chemistry from the RSC 1982: Tilden Prize and Lectureship, RSC 1984: American Chemical Society Award in Inorganic Chemistry 1985: Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) 1985: Medal in Organometallic Chemistry, RSC 1988: Sir Edward Frankland Prize Lecturership, RSC 1995: Awarded the Davy Medal by the Royal Society 1992: From the Gesellschaft Deutscher Chemiker, the Karl-Ziegler Prize 2000: Sir Geoffrey Wilkinson Medal and Prize, RSC Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC) 2015: From the European Association for Chemical and Molecular Sciences, the European Prize for Organometallic Chemistry