Jeff Penfold awarded the 2013 Rideal Lectureship
The Society of Chemical Industry and the Royal Society of Chemistry have jointly awarded their 2013 Rideal Lectureship to Professor Jeff Penfold of the STFC ISIS Pulsed Neutron & Muon Source and Oxford University. The Rideal Lectureship commemorates the great English physical chemist, Sir Eric Rideal FRS, whose work had such impact on the fields of electrochemistry, chemical kinetics, catalysis, electrophoresis, colloids and surface chemistry.
Jeff’s work has been highlighted because of his major scientific contributions to surfactant, colloid and interface science. He and John Hayter were the first people to formulate a strategy and the necessary analytical methods for the quantitative interpretation of neutron small angle scattering data from micellar solutions (indeed these methods are still the main ones used today). Second, with colleagues at Unilever plc, Jeff has pioneered the development of shear-flow methods in conjunction with small angle scattering. And thirdly, Jeff has played a major role in both the instrumental and methodological development of neutron reflectometry, now widely used for studying interfaces of all kinds.