David Husain

Chemist David Husain along with his colleagues carried out the pioneering work on the rapidity with which excited atoms reacted with simple molecules, such as hydrogen and the light alkenes. This process of great relevance in the context of atmosphere chemistry was carried out in the mid-1960s at Cambridge University. In Cambridge David ascended the academic ladder - Demonstrator in 1963, Lecturer in 1968 and Reader in 1986; and he was elected a teaching fellow in Pembroke College, a post he held until his retirement in 2004. With an encyclopaedic memory David could recite verbatim, numerous sources within his formidable library of some 7,000 books. He was awarded in 1974 the prestigious Corday Morgan prize and later the Tilden prize of the Royal Society of Chemistry. He was elected a Fellow of the Institute of Physics, the Royal Society of Chemistry and a member of the New York Academy of Sciences. David Husain was born of an Indian Test cricketer and a Jewish mother of Russian extraction, at Grimsby, Lincolnshire.

Compiler: M. Nauman Khan