Emeritus Professor John Dyke

Professor John M Dyke BSc(Wales, PhD(Bristol), CChem FRSC 

John Dyke was an undergraduate at University College Wales Cardiff, and graduated with a first class honours degree. He studied for a PhD under the supervision of Dr Noel Hush in Bristol University. The topic of this research was the study of electron transfer reactions in solution and in solids with spectroscopic methods. He then took up a position as a research chemist with Ciba-Geigy on the development of a new colour film and process.

After that, he was a post-doctoral fellow with Professor Neville Jonathan at Southampton University. He was later appointed as a lecturer in Physical Chemistry at Southampton and in 1988 he was appointed to a Chair in Physical Chemistry. In 1990 he was awarded a Wolfson prize for research excellence and in 2008 he won a Royal Society of Chemistry prize for promotion of chemistry.

As well as carrying out research in Southampton, he is a visiting professor at Manchester, Lisbon, Rome, and Hong Kong Universities, where he has collaborative projects. He also has ongoing projects with groups in Mauritius and Gothenburg He is chair of the Atomic, Molecular and Plasmas panel at the Elettra synchrotron (Trieste, Italy).

John Dyke’s research focuses on the role of reactive intermediates in atmospheric chemistry and combustion as studied experimentally using spectroscopy and kinetics, and supported computationally by electronic structure calculations. Photoionization and photoexcitation methods using lasers, synchrotron radiation and laboratory discharge sources are used to monitor and probe reactive intermediates in the gas-phase.