Ronald Gillespie
Canadian inorganic chemist (1924-2021)
Ronald James Gillespie, (August 21, 1924 – February 26, 2021) was a British chemist specializing in the field of molecular geometry, who arrived in Canada after accepting an offer that included his own laboratory with new equipment, which post-World War II Britain could not provide. He was responsible for establishing inorganic chemistry education in Canada.
He was educated at the University of London obtaining a B.Sc. in 1945, a Ph.D. in 1949 and a D.Sc. in 1957. He was assistant lecturer and then lecturer in the Department of Chemistry at University College London in England from 1950 to 1958.
He moved to McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, in 1958. He was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1965, a Fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1977, and made a member of the Order of Canada in 2007. Gillespie died on February 26, 2021, at the age of ninety-six in the town of Dundas, Ontario.
Gillespie did extensive work on expanding the idea of the Valence Shell Electron Pair Repulsion (VSEPR) model of Molecular Geometry, which he developed with Ronald Nyholm (and thus is also known as the Gillespie-Nyholm theory), and setting the rules for assigning numbers.
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