James A. Ibers (1930–2021)

Jim Ibers was born in Los Angeles, CA, USA, in 1930. His early ambition was to become an archaeologist, then an astronomer, and then a chemist, so he applied to Caltech, his neighbourhood school for science and engineering, graduating in 1951. During his undergraduate years, he did research with Verner Schomaker and took a course in X-ray crystallography. He became hooked.

After receiving his PhD in 1954, he travelled to Melbourne, Australia, on a one-year postdoctoral fellowship at CSIRO on electron diffraction of solids, returning to California to characterise solids for Shell, where he wrote a number of crystallographic papers in his spare time. In 1962 he became a Senior Chemist at Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, NY, where he took advantage of the state-of-the-art neutron diffraction facilities at the graphite reactor to study O–H…O bonding.

At around that time, with Kathleen Lonsdale as General Editor, Caroline MacGillavry and Gerard Rieck were appointed editors of Volume III (Physical and chemical tables) of International Tables for X-ray Crystallography, the “Red Series”, and Jim Ibers and Walter Hamilton were appointed editors of Volume IV (Revised and supplementary tables to Volumes II and III). Volume IV was published in 1974.  

In 1965 Ibers moved to Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, as a Professor, remaining there for the remainder of his career. According to the Web of Science, he published nearly 900 scientific articles (115 of them in IUCr journals), which have received nearly 46,000 citations. His h index is 102. A search of the Cambridge Structural Database finds 640 refcodes associated with his name, and there are 723 Inorganic Crystal Structure Database entries attributed to him. With Walter Hamilton he wrote the book Hydrogen Bonding in Solids (1968). Among the awards and honours he received are the American Chemical Society Award in Inorganic Chemistry, the American Chemical Society Award for Distinguished Service in the Advancement of Inorganic Chemistry, the Linus Pauling Medal, the California Institute of Technology Distinguished Alumni Award and the Martin J. Buerger Award of the American Crystallographic Association. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and to the U. S. National Academy of Sciences. Interested readers are referred to his Memoir on the ACA History Portal, from which much of the above information has been extracted.

Professor Ibers died on 14 December 2021 at the age of 91, having still been collaborating on scientific papers a month earlier. He was predeceased by his wife of 69 years, Joyce, in 2020, and leaves a daughter, Jill, and son, Art. A full obituary will be published in the IUCr Newsletter in due course. Remembrances by some of his students and postdocs can be found in the Spring 2022 issue of the Newsletter of the American Crystallographic Association.