Joseph Chatt

Joseph Chatt (born November 6, 1914 in Horden , County Durham , † May 19, 1994 in Hove ) was a British chemist.

life and work

Chatt grew up on a farm in Cumberland . He studied chemistry at the University of Cambridge (Emmanuel College), where he earned a degree in 1937 and FG man on the chemistry of organic arsenic and phosphorus compounds and their complexes with transition metals doctorate . In 1941/42 he was a research chemist at the Woolwich Arsenal of the British Army in the development of explosives. 1942-1946 he was a senior chemist at the company Peter Spence and Sons and 1946-47 he was ICI Research Fellow at Imperial College in London . From 1947 to 1962 he was with ICI, first as head of inorganic chemistry at Butterwick Research Laboratories in The Frythe near Welwyn and then in 1961/62 as group leader in the Heavy Organic Chemicals Division. At ICI, he and his colleague Bernard Shaw researched metal hydrides and metal- alkene complexes. In 1964 he was briefly professor at Queen Mary College in London and from 1964 until his retirement in 1980 professor at the University of Sussex . From 1963 to 1980 he was director of the Unit of Nitrogen Fixation for the Agricultural Research Council and researched the mechanisms of nitrogen fixation (important for the manufacture of fertilizers).

In 1981 he received the Wolf Prize in Chemistry for his fundamental contributions to the synthetic chemistry of transition metals, especially transition metal hydrides and dinitrogen complexes . In 1961 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society . He became a CBE in 1978 and an Honorary Fellow of his old college in Cambridge. In 1979 he received the Davy Medal . The American Academy of Arts and Sciences made him a member in 1985.

He had been married since 1947 and had a son and a daughter.

Web links

• biography
• Obituary by John Postgate in The Independent

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Life data, publications and academic family tree of Joseph Chatt at academictree.org, accessed on January 28, 2018.