Nigel G. Adams

Nigel G. Adams, Professor Emeritus of Chemistry at the University of Georgia in Athens, died suddenly on 2 November 2016. Nigel was born in Birmingham, England and received his B.Sc. in Physics from the University of Birmingham in 1963, and an M.Sc. in the Physics of Solids in 1964. He was awarded a Ph.D. in Electron Physics in 1966, also from the University of Birmingham, for his studies of the surface interactions of electrons with insulator single crystals. He was an SRO/NASA International University Research Fellow at the University of Colorado in Boulder for the period 19681969, after which he returned to the UK and the University of Birmingham, moving through the ranks to Senior Research Fellow and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Space Research. In 1978 he was awarded a D.Sc. for his research in Space Physics. In 1990 he moved to the University of Georgia as Professor of Chemistry. In 1995 he became a University Research Professor, and in 2000 he became a Distinguished Research Professor. He was a visiting Erskine Fellow at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand in 1995, and for the period 19992000 he was a Program Director for Physical Chemistry at the National Science Foundation. He was elected to fellowships in the UK Institute of Physics (1984) and the American Physical Society (2004). Research in the Adams lab concentrated on the fundamentals of gas-phase ionic reaction processes and their application to natural plasmas, with relevance to the interstellar medium and to planetary atmospheres. To measure pertinent reactions in the laboratory, he was co-inventor of the powerful Selected Ion Flow Tube (SIFT) method for studying ion molecule reactions under conditions that simulate the low temperature, low pressure plasmas of the ISM. Adams also developed and refined the Flowing Afterglow Langmuir Probe (FALP) apparatus, which is used to examine electron-ion recombination, a key process in the formation of many species of interest in Space Physics. His work was groundbreaking in the identification and quantification of the neutral products of ion-electron recombination reactions. During his career he published over 200 scientific papers, edited several books, and was an invited speaker at numerous conferences and symposia. Adams retired on July 31, 2014 after almost 25 years in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Georgia. He is survived by his loving family: his wife Lucia; his children Liz, Robin, Ian, and Lydia; his sisters Beryl and Zena; and his grandson Jamie; as well as many nieces and nephews.