Chair of Chemistry in University College, Bangor

Abstract

UNDER the late Prof. Kennedy Orton, the Department of Chemistry of the University College of North Wales, Bangor, became one of the first of those modern schools of research which are concerned with the elucidation of the nature and mechanism of the reactions of organic chemistry. It therefore seems appropriate that Dr. Edward David Hughes, one of Prof. Orton's many distinguished pupils, should follow Prof. J. L. Simonsen in Prof. Orton's chair. After graduating in Bangor with first class honours in chemistry in 1927, Dr. Hughes commenced, under the leadership of his professor and of Dr. H. B. Watson, then on the College staff at Bangor, his first researches in the general field to which he has contributed so considerably. For this work he was awarded the Ph.D. degree and a studentship of the University of Wales in 1930. In that year he proceeded to University College, London, and there, first as a research student under Prof. C. K. Ingold, than as a research fellow, and finally as a member of the College staff, he continued the work which brought him in rapid succession the highest research degrees of the University of London, the British Ramsay Fellowship, and, in 1936, the Meldola Medal of the Institute of Chemistry (awarded for the most distinguished chemical work carried out under the age of thirty). Dr. Hughes is author or joint author of more than seventy papers published in British and American scientific journals. His most noted work relates to the establishment of ionization (or 'heterolysis') as controlling phase in a large class of substitution and elimination reactions of saturated molecules and ions, the discovery of the rules governing the spatial orientation of substitution (including a demonstration, by the use of radio-halogens, of the invariability of Walden inversion in bimolecular substitution), and the. elucidation of circumstances which control the appearance of steric hindrance in substitution processes.