Professor John Maier Delivers the 2010 Sir Jesse Boot Foundation Lecture

Professor John Maier from the University of Basel has presented his work for this year’s Sir Jesse Boot Foundation Lecture. The Lecture has been an annual event in the School of Chemistry since 1922 and is to celebrate the benefactions of Sir Jesse Boot – the first Baron Trent - to (what was then) University College, Nottingham. In particular, the Lecture celebrates the foundation and endowment of the Sir Jesse Boot Chair of Chemistry. The Lecture is delivered on some aspect of Chemistry which bears on the life of the community or the industries of the City of Nottingham.  

Professor John Maier graduated from Nottingham University in 1969 before pursuing a DPhil at Oxford. He then moved to Basel, where he has enjoyed an illustrious scientific career and achieved a number of awards including the Marlow medal of the RSC. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1999.

In his Lecture John Maier described his group’s success in recording electronic spectra of highly reactive gas-phase carbon chains, rings and ions. He described how the research is motivated in significant part by the problem of the diffuse interstellar bands – a large number of mysterious astronomical absorption features that have defied explanation for almost 100 years.