Information
Membership Number: FCA1225
Membership Type: Fellowship
Division: Natural Sciences
Corresponding Email: ****igra@iq.usp.br
Homepage(s): https://bv.fapesp.br/en/pesquisador/5333/jose-manuel-riveros-nigra/
Present and Previous Positions
Emeritus Professor at the Institute of Chemistry of the University of São Paulo (IQ-USP), Brazil, where he was the Director from 1982 to 1986, and Head of the Fundamental Chemistry Department twice, from 1981 to 1982 and from 1992 to 1993. Prof. Riveros has been an advisor to the Brazilian Association of Synchrotron Light Technology – ABTLuS, and a former member of the Editorial Boards of Spectrochimica Acta A, Journal of Mass Spectrometry, Mass Spectrometry Reviews, International Journal of Mass Spectrometry and Journal of the Brazilian Chemical Society, and President Emeritus of the Brazilian Society of Mass Spectrometry.
Bachelor’s degree in Chemistry from the University of California at Berkeley in 1962, and his Ph.D. degree in Chemistry from Harvard University in 1966, under the supervision of Professor E. Bright Wilson Jr., a world renowned physical and quantum chemist of the 20th century. Prof. Riveros is internationally known for his important contributions to the field of gas phase ion-molecule reactions using a combination of mass spectrometric techniques and electronic structure calculations.
He was Visiting Professor at the École Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne; the University of Amsterdam; the Federal University of Bahia; the Institute of Molecular Sciences; Okazaki, Japan; the University of California, Irvine; the MIT Regional Laser Center; the Federal University of São Carlos; the City University of New York and Harvard University
Fields of Scholarship and Research Interests
Ph.D. in Chemical Sciences, Harvard University
The most important works of his scientific life are related to diverse subjects such as rotational spectroscopy, free radical spectroscopy, basicity of organic substances in the gas phase, stability and formation of solvated ions in the gas phase, mechanisms of ionic reactions in the gas phase, experimental and theoretical characterization of benzene-related species, chemical reactions initiated by multiphoton absorption, and more recently, on ion spectroscopy, unimolecular fragmentations induced by incoherent thermal radiation; and ion chemistry of organosilanes in the gas phase. A series of papers published in the 1970s gave rise to what is now known as the "Riveros reaction" in the gas-phase ion chemistry community.
Prof. Riveros continues to contribute to the IQ-USP as a Senior Professor and his research has been primarily dedicated to the study of chemical reactions in the gas phase. His studies have primarily involved the chemistry of gas-phase ions, mechanisms of gas-phase ionic reactions, semiclassical molecular dynamics of simple reactions, gas-phase ion solvation, the thermodynamic characterization of solvated ions in solution and pKa calculations, molecular spectroscopy using various techniques and applications of multiphoton infrared excitation using lasers and blackbody radiation in the study of gas-phase ions.
Honors, Awards and Other Membership
With more than one hundred publications, his contributions in the field of physical chemistry have earned him, in addition to a reaction known in the literature as the “Riveros reaction”, several awards and honors including election to full membership in the Brazilian Academy of Sciences in 1980 and the National Order of Merit, Category “Grão Cruz”, in 2005. In addition, his work has been recognized by a Special Issue in his honor of the International Journal of Mass Spectrometry (Volume 418, July 2017) and a Special Issue of the online journal ARKIVOC (Volume 2020(ii)).
Other Information
https://www.brjac.com.br/artigos/2020-V7-N27/brjac-interview-jmrnigra.pdf
https://www.abc.org.br/membro/jose-manuel-riveros-nigra/