Dan Eley
British chemist (1914-2015)

Daniel Douglas Eley (1 October 1914 – 3 September 2015) was a British chemist and Professor of Physical Chemistry at the University of Nottingham. He is known for the Eley–Rideal mechanism in surface chemistry.
Biography
Eley obtained a BSc in Chemistry from the University of Manchester in 1934, and an MSc in 1935. He studied for a PhD with Michael Polanyi which he obtained in 1937, but then moved to St John's College, Cambridge where he undertook a second PhD with Eric Rideal which he obtained in 1940.
In 1945 he was appointed to a Lectureship in Colloid Science at the University of Bristol and was promoted to a Readership in Biophysical Chemistry in 1951. In 1954 he was appointed to be the first Professor of Physical Chemistry at the University of Nottingham. In 1961 he was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE), and in 1964 he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society.
Academic career
Eley was instrumental in the development of the School of Chemistry at the University of Nottingham (formerly the Department of Chemistry). Together with Alan Johnson and Cliff Addison (Professors of Organic and Inorganic Chemistry, respectively) he oversaw the construction of a new Chemistry building in 1960.
Eley worked in a variety of areas including heterogeneous catalysis, organic semiconductors, molecular sieves, photochemistry and radiation chemistry, X-ray crystallography, equilibria in solution, colloids and interfaces and magnetic properties of materials.
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This entry incorporates text from “Dan Eley” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.