Tristram Chivers

Tristram Chivers
Born	(1940-08-22) August 22, 1940
Citizenship	United Kingdom and Canada
Education	Durham University (BSc, PhD)
Scientific career
Fields	Inorganic chemistry
Institutions	University of Calgary
Thesis	Some pentafluorophenyl derivatives of tin and boron (1964)
Doctoral advisor	Richard Dickinson Chambers

Tristram Chivers FRSC (born 22 August 1940) is a British-Canadian chemist and Professor Emeritus at the University of Calgary. His main research interest is the inorganic chemistry of the main group elements, particularly boron, nitrogen, phosphorus, sulfur, selenium, and tellurium.

Chivers was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1991 and has been described as the 'godfather' of main group chemistry in Canada. He is also a Fellow of the Chemical Institute of Canada.

Early life and education

Chivers was born in Bath, Somerset and attended Colston's School in Bristol. He graduated from Durham University in 1961 with a first-class degree in chemistry. He stayed on at Durham for doctoral studies, and completed his PhD in 1964 under the supervision of R. D. Chambers. He was awarded the DSc degree by Durham University in 1981.

Career and research

After brief periods as a postdoc at the University of Cincinnati and as a tutorial fellow at the University of Sussex, he moved permanently to Canada in 1967 and joined the University of British Columbia as a teaching post-doctoral fellow. He was hired by the University of Calgary in 1969 as Assistant Professor, and was promoted to Professor in 1978. He served as head of the chemistry department from 1977 to 1982.

At Calgary, Chivers and his colleagues made 'notable contributions' to the chemistry of chalcogen compounds. One early finding was to identify the blue species formed by sulfur in reducing media as the trisulfur radical anion, subsequently shown by Robin Clark to be the blue chromophore in the mineral lapis lazuli. Several ring and cage compounds discovered by Chivers and his collaborators are now 'textbook examples' – the 1998 edition of Chemistry of the Elements by Norman Greenwood and Alan Earnshaw features twelve pages on sulfur–nitrogen chemistry research from his laboratory.

He was Senior Editor of the Canadian Journal of Chemistry (1993–1998) and later served as President of the Canadian Society for Chemistry (CSC) (2000–2001).

He was the 2001 recipient of the E. W. R. Steacie Award of the Canadian Society for Chemistry, and was awarded an honorary degree by the University of Oulu in Finland in 2006. He also received the 2025 Wolfgang Günther Award for Lifetime Achievement in Selenium and Tellurium Chemistry.

Selected publications

Books

• Chivers, Tristram (2005). A Guide to Chalcogen–Nitrogen Chemistry. World Scientific. ISBN 9789812560957.
• Chivers, Tristram; Manners, Ian (2009). Inorganic Rings and Polymers of the p-Block Elements: From Fundamentals to Applications. Royal Society of Chemistry. ISBN 9781847559067.
• Chivers, Tristram; Laitinen, Risto S. (2021). Chalcogen–Nitrogen Chemistry: From Fundamentals to Applications in Biological, Physical and Materials Sciences. World Scientific. ISBN 9789811241352.

Journal articles

• Chivers, Tristram; Drummond, I. (1972). "Characterization of the trisulfur radical anion S₃⁻ in blue solutions of alkali polysulfides in hexamethylphosphoramide" (PDF). Inorganic Chemistry. 11 (10): 2521–2523. doi:10.1021/ic50116a047.
• Bojes, J.; Chivers, T.; Laidlaw, W. G.; Trsic, M. (1979). "The crystal and molecular structure of [n-Bu₄N][S₃N₃] and the vibrational structure of the trisulfur trinitride anion". Journal of the American Chemical Society. 101 (16): 4517–4522.
• Chivers, Tristram; Hyne, J. B.; Lau, C. (1980). "The thermal decomposition of hydrogen sulfide over transition metal sulfides". International Journal of Hydrogen Energy. 5 (5): 499–507.
• Chivers, Tristram (1985). "Synthetic methods and structure-reactivity relationships in electron-rich sulfur-nitrogen rings and cages" (PDF). Chemical Reviews. 85 (5): 341–365. doi:10.1021/cr00069a001.
• Chivers, T.; Gao, X.; Parvez, M. (1996). "Preparation, Crystal Structures, and Isomerization of the Tellurium Diimide Dimers RNTe(μ-NR′)₂TeNR (R = R′ = ^tBu; R = PPh₂NSiMe₃, R′ = ^tBu, ^tOct): X-ray Structure of the Telluradiazole Dimer [^tBu₂C₆H₂N₂Te]₂" (PDF). Inorganic Chemistry. 35 (1): 9–15.
• Piers, Warren E.; Chivers, Tristram (1997). "Pentafluorophenylboranes: from obscurity to applications". Chemical Society Reviews. 26 (5): 345–354. doi:10.1039/CS9972600345.
• Briand, G.; Chivers, T.; Parvez, M. (2002). "A new approach to metalated imido and amido tellurophosphoranes" (PDF). Angewandte Chemie International Edition. 41 (18): 3468–3470.
• Garje, S. S.; Eisler, D. J.; Ritch, J. S.; Afzaal, M.; O’Brien, P.; Chivers, T. (2006). "A new route to antimony telluride nanoplates from a single-source precursor" (PDF). Journal of the American Chemical Society. 128 (10): 3120–3121. doi:10.1021/ja0582408.
• Chivers, Tristram; Laitinen, Risto S. (2015). "Tellurium: a maverick among the chalcogens". Chemical Society Reviews. 44 (7): 1725–1739. doi:10.1039/C4CS00434E.

External links

• Tristram Chivers publications indexed by Google Scholar