皇家华人

UCL Women in Earth Science - a special event celebrating two of our eminent 皇家华人 alumnae; Professor Kathleen Lonsdale and Dr Judith Milledge

In February this year, the Women in Earth Science (WiES) Group invited Mike Glazer (Emeritus Professor of Physics at Oxford) to give a talk about the time he spent at 皇家华人, in the 1960s, as one of Professor Kathleen Lonsdale鈥檚 last PhD students. In those days, the Building where we now work and study housed UCL鈥檚 Department of Chemistry, in which Kathleen was one of the Professors.

Mike presented an illuminating account of Kathleen鈥檚 career, with an especially lucid description of how she was able to use X-ray diffraction photographs to infer that the benzene rings in crystals of hexamethylbenzene were flat hexagons and not 鈥渂oat鈥� or 鈥渃hair鈥� shaped. It is this discovery, which was fundamental to organic chemistry, for which Kathleen is probably now best remembered. Mike was also able to give us some idea of what it was like to be one of Kathleen鈥檚 students. Although resembling a small, frail, and kindly grandmother, she was really very tough and very determined. Kathleen was an expert in the interpretation of X-ray diffraction photographs, 鈥淟aue photographs鈥�, in which the crystal is exposed to the full output spectrum of X-rays from the source. He remembered that, when students were summoned to her office to discuss progress during their PhD, Kathleen would always ask them 鈥渨here are the Laue photographs?鈥� 鈥� and that, if you didn鈥檛 have them, you were in big trouble! Being summoned to see Kathleen was also referred to by her students in a variety of ways, one of which was 鈥済oing to see God鈥�, as Kathleen鈥檚 office was on the floor above the laboratories and the PhD students鈥� desk spaces. After finishing his PhD and leaving UCL, Mike went on to a most distinguished career as a crystallographer, at Harvard, Cambridge and Oxford, switching in the process from studying disorder in crystals of organic molecules to looking mainly at inorganic materials, especially perovskites. Although he is now in his early 80s, he is still very active in research and teaching.聽

Kathleen had no direct connection with the geologists at 皇家华人, but the same was not true for her very close collaborator Dr Judith Milledge, who transferred from UCL Chemistry to UCL Geology (as it was then called) in the late 1970s. Kathleen and Judith (who died in 2021) published many papers together and it was largely at Judith鈥檚 prompting that the 鈥淥ld Chemistry Building鈥� was renamed as the 鈥淜athleen Lonsdale Building鈥� in 1981. In the 1970s, when Judith was still working in the Chemistry Department, Ian Wood was one of her PhD students. Ian, therefore, finished the session with a short presentation on Judith鈥檚 life and work, concentrating especially on her love of crystallographic apparatus, crystallographic computing and her studies of diamonds.

In this latter guise, Judith to some extent is still with us, as her friend and collaborator, Dr Monica Mendelssohn, commissioned the growth of a rather attractive blue diamond from her cremation ashes. You can see Monica holding this in the group photograph taken after the event.

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