Nick Besley - obituary
23 December 1972 - 27 June 2021
It is with great sadness that we report the sudden and untimely death of our valued colleague and dear friend Nick Besley, aged 48. On 14 June 2021, Nick had a cycling accident in Wollaton Park and suffered a fatal brain injury. He died 27 June at the Queen's Medical Centre, Nottingham.
Nicholas Alan Besley was born 23 December 1972 in Wickford, Essex, to Alan Besley, a draughtsman, and Dee (nee Wells), a bank employee. He grew up in Thundersley, Essex, attending local schools, Thundersley County Junior School, The Deanes School and South East Essex Sixth Form College.
Nick was the first in his extended family to go to university and graduated from the University of Sussex in 1994 with a BSc in Chemical Physics, publishing several papers. One of his first research publications was on iron clusters with Tony Stace and the late Roy Johnston. Nick undertook a PhD with Peter Knowles, starting at the University of Sussex, and moving with Peter to the University of Birmingham. Nick’s PhD, awarded in 1997, focused on coupled cluster theory calculations of the potential energy surface of the important prototypical reaction of a chlorine atom reacting with a hydrogen chloride molecule.
Nick then moved to sunnier climes, working for two years as a postdoc at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, with Jonathan Hirst, on electronic structure calculations of amides and proteins. He used quantum chemistry to study how light interacts with proteins and giving new insights into how these complex biomolecules adopt their intricate, biologically relevant shapes.
In 1999, Nick’s career at the University of Nottingham began. His work as a postdoc with Peter Gill, who had just moved to Nottingham from Cambridge, included method development in the quantum chemistry software Q-Chem and the theory of intracules, as part of examining fundamental aspects of density functional theory (DFT). This formed the basis of a prestigious EPSRC Advanced Research Fellowship, which Nick was awarded in 2002. From there, Nick went from strength to strength, studying diverse molecular systems and finding new synergies between theory and experiment, including calculations of core electron spectroscopy and other electronic excited states. He became a leading expert in modelling the spectroscopy of core electrons with DFT.
Along the way, he met Elena (nee Bichoutskaia) and they married in 2007. Elena became a scientific colleague, collaborating with Nick on computational studies of nanomaterials, and is herself currently Professor of Theoretical and Computational Chemistry at the University of Nottingham.
Nick was promoted to Professor of Theoretical Chemistry in 2018. He enjoyed many scientific interactions. Just within our own School, he co-authored research papers with more than a dozen colleagues. Nick was an active committee member of the Theoretical Chemistry Group of the Royal Society of Chemistry, establishing the RSC Theoretical Chemistry Group international conference and organising the first two conferences in the series in 2011 and 2013.He was engaged with many RSC initiatives including invited talks at the RSC Spectroscopy and Dynamics Group and Theoretical Chemistry Group meetings as well as RSC-led international meetings such as joint symposia on Computational Chemistry in Bangkok, Thailand and Bandung, Indonesia in 2015. It was a pleasure to observe Nick flourish as a teacher and a researcher at the University of Nottingham. Highly regarded by colleagues and undergraduates for his lecturing, Nick was awarded a School of Chemistry Teaching Excellence Award in 2018.
Nick was a true scholar, quiet and unassuming. Few of his colleagues knew of his prowess as a triathlete and his guitar playing. Amongst his many fine qualities was a willingness to the see and assume the best in everyone. Nick was a devoted father and husband and is survived by his wife, Elena, and their daughter, Emily.
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