Joseph Gerratt (1938-1997) was brought up in Northampton (UK). He graduated in Chemistry from the University of Oxford in 1961 and obtained his Ph.D. in 1966 with I.M. Mills in Reading (UK). He was a post-doctoral fellow with W.N. Lipscomb at Harvard University from 1966 to 1967, during which time he laid the foundations of spin-coupled theory, leading to a major paper published in Adv. Atom. Mol. Phys. in 1971. After a lectureship at the University of East Anglia (UK), Joe moved to The School of Chemistry at the University of Bristol in 1968, where he was a Reader in Theoretical Chemistry. Photo.
Mario Raimondi (email: mario.raimondi@unimi.it) was born in Gravedona (Como), Italy in 1939. After graduating from Milan University with a thesis in Theoretical Chemistry under the supervision of Prof. Massimo Simonetta, he was a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard with Martin Karplus. His main scientific interest is in Valence Bond theory and he has developed sophisticated algorithms for carrying out ab initio calculations. Mario is now Professor of Physical Chemistry at the University of Milan in the Department of Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry. Joe and Mario met one another in 1975 at CECAM, which was then located in Paris (France). The ensuing cooperation led to the first publication on the spin-coupled valence bond method in Proc. Roy. Soc. (Lond.) A in 1980. They were subsequently joined in 1982 by David, with the first joint paper published in 1984. The Gang of Three collaborated very closely on a wide range of projects.
They were subsequently joined by Dr Peter Karadakov and have been fortunate to work with a number of other people, some of whom who are listed here.
