Gary Schrobilgen

Professor Emeritus, Chemistry & Chemical Biology

0000-0001-5109-6979

GARY J. SCHROBILGEN, a native of Eastern Iowa (USA), received his B.S. degree in chemistry from Loras College (Dubuque, Iowa), a M.Sc. degree in inorganic chemistry from Brock University (St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada), and carried out his Ph.D. research in inorganic fluorine chemistry at McMaster University (Hamilton, Ontario) under the supervision of Prof. Ronald J. Gillespie. Prof. Schrobilgen was a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) of Canada Postdoctoral Fellow at Leicester University, U.K. and joined the McMaster Chemistry Department as an NSERC University Research Fellow (1980-90) and member of faculty, and was promoted to full Professor in 1988.

He has made important contributions in two major areas of synthetic and structural inorganic chemistry; main-group and transition metal fluorine chemistry and the polyatomic anions of the main-group elements. Both programs are heavily reliant upon the use of modern methods of structural elucidation, including multi-NMR spectroscopy, X-ray crystallography, and vibrational spectroscopy, as well as quantum-chemical calculations, to characterize novel bonding situations among main-group and high-oxidation state transition element species. He is best known for his work in the experimentally challenging field of inorganic fluorine chemistry, encompassing the syntheses and structural characterization of a large percentage of the known compounds of krypton and xenon 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 also known for his work in two areas of radiochemistry; the syntheses of 99Tc fluorine compounds that are relevant to the uranium fuel cycle and 18F-labelled radiopharmaceuticals of use in PE (positron emission) imaging of the human brain. His fundamental work has been of importance in our understanding of structure and chemical bonding in hyper-valent molecules and main-group ring, cage, and cluster species. Many of his compounds are now textbook examples. Another of Prof. Schrobilgen’s trademarks has been his hands-on, apprentice-style approach to graduate and undergraduate training in synthetic/structural inorganic chemistry.