George M. Sheldrick (1942 – 2025)

George Michael Sheldrick, Professor Emeritus, University of Göttingen, Germany, passed away on February 20, 2025. The International Union of Crystallography (IUCr) describes him as a “prominent figure in crystallography whose contributions have shaped the field for decades”. He was known for his passion for solving problems, his originality, his sense of humor, and his profound humanity.

Professor Sheldrick specialized in structural analysis through X-ray diffraction and developed the SHELX program suite, originally for small molecules, which now includes solutions for macromolecular structure determination using direct methods, Patterson techniques, and dual-space approaches.

George Michael Sheldrick, born in Huddersfield, UK, in November 1942, studiedsciences at the University of Cambridge, UK, and earned his Ph.D. from there in 1966. He held various positions, including a lectureship at the Faculty of Chemistry in Cambridge, before being appointed to the University of Göttingen in 1978, where he remained until 2020. Most recently, he served as an emeritus professor under the Niedersachsen Professorship, a funding program of the state of Lower Saxony for retired university faculty.

Among many other honors, George Michael Sheldrick received in 1970 the Meldola Medal of the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC), in 1978 the Corday-Morgan-Medaille of the RSC, in 1988 the Gottfried-Wilhelm-Leibniz-Preis of the Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), in 1999 the Carl-Hermann-Medaille der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Kristallographie, in 2004 the Max-Perutz-Preis of the European Crystallographic Association, in 2009 the Gregori-Aminoff-Preis der Königlich Schwedischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, and in 2011 the Ewald-Preis der International Union of Crystallography (IUCr).

Since 2024, the European Crystallographic Association awards the George Sheldrick Award.

Selected Publications

Ursula M. Kotyrba, Kevin Pröpper, Eike-F. Sachs, Anastasiya Myanovska, Tobias Joppe, Friederike Lissy, George M. Sheldrick, Konrad Koszinowski, Ulf Diederichsen, Triostin A Derived Cyclopeptide as Architectural Template for the Alignment of Four Recognition Units, ChemistryOpen 2014, 3, 152–160. https://doi.org/10.1002/open.201400001
Jose A. Cuesta-Seijo, Jinhua Zhang, Ulf Diederichsen, George M. Sheldrick, Continuous β-turn fold of an alternating alanyl/homoalanyl peptide nucleic acid, Acta Crystallogr., Sect. D: Biol. Crystallogr. 2012, 68(8), 1067–1070. https://doi.org/10.1107/S090744491202118X
Christian B. Hübschle, George M. Sheldrick, Birger Dittrich, ShelXle: a Qt graphical user interface for SHELXL, J. Appl. Crystallogr. 2011, 44(6), 1281–1284. https://doi.org/10.1107/S0021889811043202

Kathrin Meindl, Timo Schmiederer, Kathrin Schneider, Andreas Reicke, Diane Butz, Simone Keller, Hans Gühring, László Vértesy, Joachim Wink, Holger Hoffmann, Mark Brönstrup, George M. Sheldrick, Roderich D. Süssmuth, Labyrinthopeptins: A New Class of Carbacyclic Lantibiotics, Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2010, 49(6), 1151–1154. https://doi.org/10.1002/anie.200905773
George M. Sheldricka, A short history of SHELX, Acta Cryst. A, Foundations and Advances 2008, 64(1), 112-122. https://doi.org/10.1107/S0108767307043930