My earliest memory of Ray was of an elderly (well, over 40) figure appearing at the back of the audience in physical chemistry lectures early in my undergraduate career at Oxford. At the time we thought he was some sort of government inspector, but it turned out that he was returning to Oxford to teach after some years in industry and re-familiarising himself with the curriculum. The next year he was my tutor in physical chemistry, and a superb teacher. I only realised later that the reason he had everything at his fingertips in that first year was that he had mugged up all the material the night before each tutorial.
When the time came for me to choose a research group for my Part II research year, Ray was the natural choice. For me, as it was for many subsequent students, this was the best academic decision I ever made, and one that changed the course of my life. Ray was not at all the conventional image of a doctoral supervisor, a remote figure descending from time to time to tell students what to do and to criticise their results. He never dictated, and rarely even advised, but somehow discussions with him always led to new and fruitful approaches to problems. He had the gift, unique in my experience, of being able to draw the best out of everyone in the group. Many of our research ideas were generated by other group members; but none of those ideas would have emerged without Ray’s quiet prompting, often over coffee and tea breaks. Only in hindsight did I realise that he had made a conscious decision when starting his academic research to cede the practical side of the work almost entirely to his students, giving them immediate ownership of research work and building their confidence and self-reliance. He rarely even assigned research projects; new students were instead encouraged to learn how to operate the spectrometer, and then to develop their own project through discussions in the group. This often made for a challenging few weeks at the outset, but paid dividends in the longer term, Ray’s research students winning a string of prizes.
Ray brought about profound changes in the ways that chemists use NMR spectroscopy. Techniques that he pioneered are in daily use in every serious chemical laboratory in the world, and he made a major contribution to the central role that NMR now plays in chemical and biological research. For those of us who had the good fortune to work with him, though, it is not the great scientist that we remember, but rather the man: warm, humane, generous, devoid of self-importance, full of life and dry humour. He enriched lives as well as science.
My earliest memory of Ray was of an elderly (well, over 40) figure appearing at the back of the audience in physical chemistry lectures early in my undergraduate career at Oxford. At the time we thought he was some sort of government inspector, but it turned out that he was returning to Oxford to teach after some years in industry and re-familiarising himself with the curriculum. The next year he was my tutor in physical chemistry, and a superb teacher. I only realised later that the reason he had everything at his fingertips in that first year was that he had mugged up all the material the night before each tutorial.
When the time came for me to choose a research group for my Part II research year, Ray was the natural choice. For me, as it was for many subsequent students, this was the best academic decision I ever made, and one that changed the course of my life. Ray was not at all the conventional image of a doctoral supervisor, a remote figure descending from time to time to tell students what to do and to criticise their results. He never dictated, and rarely even advised, but somehow discussions with him always led to new and fruitful approaches to problems. He had the gift, unique in my experience, of being able to draw the best out of everyone in the group. Many of our research ideas were generated by other group members; but none of those ideas would have emerged without Ray’s quiet prompting, often over coffee and tea breaks. Only in hindsight did I realise that he had made a conscious decision when starting his academic research to cede the practical side of the work almost entirely to his students, giving them immediate ownership of research work and building their confidence and self-reliance. He rarely even assigned research projects; new students were instead encouraged to learn how to operate the spectrometer, and then to develop their own project through discussions in the group. This often made for a challenging few weeks at the outset, but paid dividends in the longer term, Ray’s research students winning a string of prizes.
Ray brought about profound changes in the ways that chemists use NMR spectroscopy. Techniques that he pioneered are in daily use in every serious chemical laboratory in the world, and he made a major contribution to the central role that NMR now plays in chemical and biological research. For those of us who had the good fortune to work with him, though, it is not the great scientist that we remember, but rather the man: warm, humane, generous, devoid of self-importance, full of life and dry humour. He enriched lives as well as science.
