About
George Michael Sheldrick, FRS (17 November 1942 – 20 February 2025) was a British chemist who specialised in molecular structure determination. He was one of the most cited workers in the field, having over 280,000 citations as of 2020 and an h-index of 113. He was a professor at the University of Göttingen from 1978 until his retirement in 2011.
George Michael Sheldrick, born in Huddersfield, UK, in November 1942, studied sciences at the University of Cambridge, UK, and earned his Ph.D. from there in 1966. He held various positions, including a lectureship at the Faculty of Chemistry in Cambridge, before being appointed to the University of Göttingen in 1978, where he remained until 2020. Most recently, he served as an emeritus professor under the Niedersachsen Professorship, a funding program of the state of Lower Saxony for retired university faculty.
Among many other honors, George Michael Sheldrick received in 1970 the Meldola Medal of the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC), in 1978 the Corday-Morgan-Medaille of the RSC, in 1988 the Gottfried-Wilhelm-Leibniz-Preis of the Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), in 1999 the Carl-Hermann-Medaille der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Kristallographie, in 2004 the Max-Perutz-Preis of the European Crystallographic Association, in 2009 the Gregori-Aminoff-Preis der Königlich Schwedischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, and in 2011 the Ewald-Preis der International Union of Crystallography (IUCr).
Since 2024, the European Crystallographic Association awards the George Sheldrick Award.
It is with a heavy heart, that we must announce the passing of George Michael Sheldrick.
