Robert Gilbert (chemist)

In 1992, he was appointed full professor, and in 1999 he started the Key Centre for Polymer Colloids, funded by the Australian Research Council, the University and industry.

His scientific advances have been based on developing novel theoretical and experimental methods to isolate individual processes in very complex systems.

By revealing the mechanistic bases of these individual processes through a combination of theory and experiment, he has significantly deepened, and in some cases revolutionised, the understanding of whole systems in small (gas-phase) and giant (polymer) reaction dynamics.

His methods are used by experimentalists to fit data and extrapolate to different pressure regimes, supplanting previous tools which were of dubious validity and accuracy.

Emulsion polymerisation is the commonest means of making a wide variety of industrial polymers, such as paints, adhesives and tyre rubber.

The complexity and the limited data types meant that conflicting assumptions could be forced to agree with experiment: there was no proper understanding of the process.

As with unimolecular reactions, the keys to the qualitative and quantitative understanding of the many processes in emulsion polymerisation are the rate coefficients of the individual steps.

Gilbert's mathematical treatments and experimental techniques revealed the fundamentals controlling these steps by enabling each of the processes to be effectively studied in isolation.

[5] Gilbert and his coworkers then revealed the mechanism for initiation in emulsion polymerisation by the entry of radicals into particles—in terms of fundamental thermodynamic and kinetic precepts—in a theory[6] that clarifies the process as being through production of surface-active species in the water phase.

One prediction, that of the independence of the entry-rate coefficient of the size and surface properties of particles, was widely seen as counterintuitive because of the deep-rooted belief in models that he had shown to be wrong.

For the propagation reaction, Gilbert led an international team that produced a methodology that overcame the long-standing problem of obtaining reliable rate coefficients for this process.

As a result of Gilbert’s work, all individual processes in emulsion polymerisation, one of the commonest ways of making everyday products, are now qualitatively and quantitatively understood.

He developed the first practical means to implement on industrially significant scales Dr E Rizzardo’s reversible addition-fragmentation chain transfer (RAFT) method of controlled radical polymerisation.