Tristram Chivers

Tristram Chivers FRSC (born 22 August 1940) is a British-Canadian chemist and Professor Emeritus at the University of Calgary. His main research interest is the inorganic chemistry of the main group elements, particularly boron, nitrogen, phosphorus, sulfur, selenium, and tellurium.^[1]

Chivers was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1991 and has been described as the 'godfather' of main group chemistry in Canada.^[2][3]

Chivers was born in Bath, Somerset and attended Colston's School in Bristol. He graduated from Durham University in 1961 with a first-class degree in chemistry.^[2] He stayed on at Durham for doctoral studies, and completed his PhD in 1964 under the supervision of R. D. Chambers.^[2][4]

After brief periods as a postdoc at the University of Cincinnati and as a tutorial fellow at the University of Sussex, he moved permanently to Canada in 1967 and joined the University of British Columbia as a teaching post-doctoral fellow. He was hired by the University of Calgary in 1969 as Assistant Professor, and was promoted to Professor in 1978.^[5][2]

At Calgary, Chivers and his colleagues made 'notable contributions' to the chemistry of chalcogen compounds. One early finding was to identify the blue species formed by sulfur in reducing media as the trisulfur radical anion, subsequently shown by Robin Clark to be the blue chromophore in the mineral lapis lazuli.^[2] Several ring and cage compounds discovered by Chivers and his collaborators are now 'textbook examples' – the 1998 edition of Chemistry of the Elements by Norman Greenwood and Alan Earnshaw features twelve pages on sulfur–nitrogen chemistry research from his laboratory.^[2]

He was Senior Editor of the Canadian Journal of Chemistry (1993–1998) and later served as President of the Canadian Society for Chemistry (CSC) (2000–2001).^[2]

• Chivers, Tristram (2005). A Guide to Chalcogen–Nitrogen Chemistry. World Scientific. ISBN 9789812560957.
• Chivers, Tristram; Manners, Ian (2009). Inorganic Rings and Polymers of the p-Block Elements: From Fundamentals to Applications. Royal Society of Chemistry. ISBN 9781847559067.
• Chivers, Tristram; Laitinen, Risto S. (2021). Chalcogen–Nitrogen Chemistry: From Fundamentals to Applications in Biological, Physical and Materials Sciences. World Scientific. ISBN 9789811241352.

• Chivers, Tristram; Drummond, I. (1972). "Characterization of the trisulfur radical anion S₃⁻ in blue solutions of alkali polysulfides in hexamethylphosphoramide". Inorganic Chemistry. 11 (10): 2521–2523. doi:10.1021/ic50116a047.
• Chivers, Tristram; Hyne, J. B.; Lau, C. (1980). "The thermal decomposition of hydrogen sulfide over transition metal sulfides". International Journal of Hydrogen Energy. 5 (5): 499–507. doi:10.1016/0360-3199(80)90035-6.
• Chivers, Tristram (1985). "Synthetic methods and structure-reactivity relationships in electron-rich sulfur-nitrogen rings and cages". Chemical Reviews. 85 (5): 341–365. doi:10.1021/cr00069a001.
• Piers, Warren E.; Chivers, Tristram (1997). "Pentafluorophenylboranes: from obscurity to applications". Chemical Society Reviews. 26 (5): 345–354. doi:10.1039/CS9972600345.
• Chivers, Tristram; Laitinen, Risto S. (2015). "Tellurium: a maverick among the chalcogens". Chemical Society Reviews. 44 (7): 1725–1739. doi:10.1039/C4CS00434E.

• Tristram Chivers publications indexed by Google Scholar