| Citation | Laurence Barron is distinguished for his work on the electric, magnetic and optical properties of molecules, especially chiral phenomena. His extension of Lord Kelvin's definition of chirality to include motion has been widely adopted. He and his colleagues discovered the chiral scattering mechanism responsible for Raman optical activity (ROA), which measures vibrational optical activity, and were the first to observe it. He developed ROA into a powerful spectroscopy and applied it to problems ranging from determination of absolute configuration to structure and behaviour of biomolecules, including protein fold determination, protein misfolding and disease, and the molecular structure of viruses. |