Robert Gilbert

Robert Goulston Gilbert (born 1946) is a polymer chemist whose most significant contributions have been in the field of emulsion polymerisation. In 1970, he gained his PhD from the Australian National University, and worked at the University of Sydney from then until 2006. In 1982, he was elected a fellow of the Royal Australian Chemical Institute; in 1994, he was elected a fellow of the Australian Academy of Science. In 1992, he was appointed full professor, and in 1999 he started the Key Centre for Polymer Colloids, funded by the Australian Research Council, the University and industry. He has served in leadership roles in the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC), the world ‘governing body’ of chemistry. He was founding chair (1987–98) of the IUPAC Working Party on the Modelling of Kinetics Processes of Polymerisation, of which he remains a member, and is a member of the IUPAC scientific task groups on starch molecular weight measurements, and terminology. He was vice-president (1996–97) and president (1998–2001) of the IUPAC Macromolecular Division, and secretary of the International Polymer Colloids Group (1997–2001). As of 2007, he is Research Professor at the Centre of Nutrition and Food Science, University of Queensland, where his research program concentrates on the relations between starch structure and nutrition. His scientific advances have been based on developing novel theoretical and experimental methods to isolate individual processes in very complex systems. By revealing the mechanistic bases of these individual processes through a combination of theory and experiment, he has significantly deepened, and in some cases revolutionised, the understanding of whole systems in small (gas-phase) and giant (polymer) reaction dynamics. Unimolecular reaction dynamics Reactions in chemical processes are either unimolecular or bimolecular. The rate of a unimolecular reaction is an average over a vast ensemble of the rate coefficients for the microscopic events of collisional energy transfer and of reaction of a completely isolated molecule. Gilbert's work in the field of unimolecular processes started with the development of theorems for this relationship. These theorems are elegant developments in matrix algebra, proving relations that had been previously known only for particular cases. His theorems also became the basis for numerical methods that he developed to perform the requisite calculations.