Laurence Barron: The founding father of Raman optical activity.

Laurence D. Barron (Fig. 1) was born in Southampton (United Kingdom) in 1944. He studied Chemistry at the Northern Polytechnic and graduated with a first class honours degree from London University (internal) in 1965. He went on to study for his doctoral degree at Lincoln College (Oxford University) under the supervision of Prof. Peter W. Atkins. At Oxford, he discovered a new fundamental light scattering mechanism from chiral molecules from which he predicted the new phenomena of Rayleigh and Raman optical activity (ROA). After completion of his PhD in 1969, Laurence moved to Cambridge University to work with David Buckingham (Fig. 2) where they developed the definitive theory of ROA in 1971 [4] and utilised this phenomenon to obtain vibrational optical activity spectra of chiral molecules through the use of circularly polarised Raman spectroscopy [3]. Lau-