Prof. Gary J. Schrobilgen

Gary John Schrobilgen, Department of Chemistry, McMaster University, has made important contributions in two major areas of main-group inorganic chemistry: fluorine chemistry and the polyatomic anions of the main-group elements. He is best known for his outstanding contributions to the experimentally challenging field of fluorine chemistry, encompassing the syntheses and structural characterization of a significant number of the known compounds of the noble gases as well as fluoro- and oxofluoro-derivatives of the main-group and transition elements in their highest oxidation states and at the limits of coordination. He is particularly known for the syntheses of new xenon-nitrogen bonds and for the first krypton-nitrogen and krypton-oxygen bonds and for his application of multi-nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and Raman spectroscopy and X-ray crystallography to the elucidation of the structures of highly unstable compounds. His work has been of importance in our understanding of structure and chemical bonding in so-called "hypervalent" molecules and in main-group ring, cage and cluster molecules.