Noel Hush


Noel Sydney Hush was an Australian chemist at the University of Sydney.

Career

Hush was born in Sydney on 15 December 1924 and obtained his BSc hons and MSc at the University of Sydney, where he worked as a research fellow in the Department of Chemistry. He then accepted an invitation from M. G. Evans FRS to work in England as an assistant lecturer at the University of Manchester in the department created by Michael Polanyi. He was subsequently lecturer and then reader in the Department of Chemistry, University of Bristol.
He returned to Australia in 1971 to found the Department of Theoretical Chemistry at the University of Sydney, the first such department in Australia. In 1989 he became a full-time research-only emeritus professor. He has held numerous prestigious visiting scientist positions at universities in Australia, the UK, and the US.

Adiabatic electron transfer

A unifying theme of Hush's research is explanation of chemical electron transfer. This is the basis of oxidation–reduction processes, which are ubiquitous in nature in both the inorganic and biological spheres. The mechanism of these reactions—the simplest of which proceed without making or breaking chemical bonds—remained unknown until the mid 1950s, when several independent theoretical studies showed that it was due to modulation of coupling between electronic and vibrational motions.
According to his Royal Society election citation, Hush's research in the area of homogeneous and heterogeneous electron transfer showed that electron transfer occurring during a collision between a molecule and either another molecule or an electrode surface occurs adiabatically on a continuous potential-energy surface, and that electron transfer can occur by either optical or thermal mechanisms with the corresponding rates being closely connected.

Awards