Molecular Simulation 25th Anniversary Symposium: A Festschrift for Professor N. Quirke

Having obtained his B.Sc. in Physics from the University of Leicester in 1973, Nick went on to take his Ph.D., also in Physics, from the University of Leicester with Professor J.L. Beeby as his advisor. His thesis, ‘The Structure of Aqueous Electrolyte Solutions and Some Problems in Neutron Scattering from Water’, was presented and successfully defended in 1977. He went on to win a Royal Society European Fellowship on the topic of Statistical Mechanics of Liquids, and spent the next few years working with experts in this area in Europe, initially with John Perram at Odense, Denmark, and later with Friedrich Kohler on perturbation theory in Bochum, Germany. During this period he started a collaboration with Giovanni Jacucci in Trento, learning molecular simulation in the process. He then moved to Royal Holloway College, just outside London, to work with Konrad Singer. Here he met many of the active young scientists working on liquid theory and simulation at the time – including Ian MacDonald, Steve Thompson, Paulette Clancy, David Fincham and David Heyes. In 1982, he accepted an offer from Jay Rasaiah to spend a year at the University of Maine, where he was involved in undergraduate teaching as well as research. The following year he received an invitation from Keith Gubbins to spend a year at Cornell University, where he carried out research on molecular modelling and simulation of liquids. Following his time at Cornell, in 1984 Nick accepted a position with British Petroleum at their research laboratory at Sunbury-on-Thames, to start and build a program on molecular modelling and simulation applied to petroleum fluids. Over the next few years, he built up a very strong team in this area that became recognised as the best in the petroleum industry. In 1992, he took a position with Biosym at their research institute in Orsay (France). One of us (Marc Meunier) had the pleasure of working with him then on a research project involving virucides dissolved in surgery gloves (which went on manufacturing about 10 years later! ). After a short period of time at the University of Wales at Bangor as Professor of Physical Chemistry – where Marc Meunier was his Ph.D. student – Nick took the position of Professor of Chemical Physics and Head of the Computational, Theoretical and Structural Chemistry group at Imperial College, London. From 2006 to 2011, he served as Vice Chancellor at University College Dublin, while on a leave of absence from Imperial College. Following this, Nick went back to his earlier position at Imperial College in London. During his professional career Nick has accumulated many awards and honours, such as the Royal Society of Chemistry 1998 Medal for Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics for his research on adsorption and transport on surfaces and in pores and the 2006 NSTI Fellow Award for Outstanding Contributions towards the Advancement of the Nanotechnology, Microtechnology and Biotechnology Community. Nick has been actively publishing in the field of simulation and nanoscience for the last 35 years and launched this very journal 25 years ago. His early work focused on simulations of liquids and nanoporous materials described (initially) by hard-sphere models and, he used various Monte Carlo and molecular dynamics approaches to predict thermodynamics properties and phase equilibria of liquids of industrial interest (e.g. alkanes or fuels). As professor, Nick’s research diversified to include modelling electron transport in high-voltage electric cables, mechanical and wetting properties of carbon nanotubes and modelling of nanomaterials in general (carbon nanopores, nanofluidics and so on). He also recently returned to wet chemistry (well, his students anyway! ) and founded the Journal of Experimental Nanoscience and Nanoscience Methods. In a recent interview, Professor N. Quirke, Editor-inChief of the journal Molecular Simulation tells how the journal has been evolving in its 25 years, growing fivefold in size. It is really a multidisciplinary journal. Contributing authors come from both fields of theoretical and experimental chemistry, physics, biology, chemical engineering and more recently from the growing field of