Herbert Marcus Powell FRS (7 August 1906 – 10 March 1991) was a British chemist and professor at the University of Oxford.
[1] Powell presented the idea of a correlation between molecular geometry and number of valence electron pairs in a Bakerian Lecture in 1940 with Nevil Sidgwick on University of Oxford.
[2] He studied chemistry at St John's College, Oxford, graduating with First Class honours in 1928, then continued to work in the Chemistry department in Oxford throughout his career.
[1] Powell supervised some of Dorothy Crowfoot's undergraduate training in crystallography.
In 1964 he became the first (and only) Professor of Chemical Crystallography, retiring from the university in 1974.