Michael Mingos was born in Basra, Iraq in 1944 and was educated in England (B.Sc. in Chemistry 1965) and University of Sussex (D.Phil, 1968). He has held academic posts at QMC, Oxford (Keble College), Imperial College, St Edmund Hall (Principal,1999-2009). His theoretical research has resulted in generalisations which have greatly influenced the development and teaching of modern inorganic chemistry. Specifically the Wade-Mingos Rules which rationalise the structures of polyhedral inorganic molecules and the Green-Davies-Mingos Rules, which account for some of the nucleophilic reactions of organometallic compounds. His group has experimentally verified some of his theoretical predictions, for example an icosahedral molecule containing gold atoms -which is relevant for understanding the metal’s nano-technological possibilities. He has also contributed to the understanding of the bonding properties of nitric oxide, an important cellular signalling molecule involved in many physiological processes and pioneered the acceleration of chemical reactions using microwave energy. He was elected the Royal Society in 1992 and the European Academy of Sciences in 2017. He holds honorary doctorates from Sussex and Manchester Universities and received many prizes – the most recent was the Blaise Pascal Medal in 2017.Paul Raithby has been Professor of Inorganic and Structural Chemistry at the University of Bath since 2000. Prior to that he spent 25 years as a Faculty member in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Cambridge. He is a Fellow of the European Academy of Sciences (EURASC) and of the Royal Society of Chemistry. He has published over 860 refereed research papers and has given over 100 lectures at national and international meetings during his career. His current research focusses on coordination chemistry, the development of the chemistry of platinum poly-ynes as sensor materials, and he has pioneered the development of time-resolved crystallographic techniques for determining the three-dimensional structures of crystalline, excited state complexes with millisecond lifetimes.
