Desmond McConnell obituary

Other lives: Mineralogist who analysed samples of moon sand from the Apollo 11 mission

My father, Desmond McConnell, who has died aged 95, made a great contribution to mineralogy, inspiring scientists around the world.

At Cambridge University in the 1960s and 70s, with the excellent X-ray diffraction facilities in the Mineralogy Department, he developed work first published by his crystallographer colleagues, Peter Gay and Mike Bown, on the incommensurate behaviour (ie falling outside the usually understood “rules”) of crystal structures. He also made significant advances in understanding a group of minerals known as plagioclase feldspars.

When Apollo 11 landed on the moon in 1969, the astronauts’ samples of moon sand were distributed to universities, and Desmond was among those who studied them. I was then 10 years old and amazed when he showed me the lunar dust in a test tube.

His career spanned both Cambridge and Oxford universities, with a period (1983-86) in industry in between, as head of the Department of Rock Physics at Schlumberger Cambridge Research. When the design of a new building for Schlumberger was in its early stages, Dad suggested a large space with an adaptable central area that could be used by all as needed, including a drilling test site if required. The architect went away and produced a design incorporating this idea and the building is now famous for being like a large tent.

In 1986, a new chair in a new subject was created at Oxford, and Desmond was appointed professor of the physics and chemistry of minerals, later becoming head of the Department of Earth Sciences until his retirement in 1995. He had been a founder fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge in 1962, and on moving to Oxford he became a fellow of St Hugh’s. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1987. He lectured in the US, China, Italy and Japan, and, on receiving the Humboldt prize in 1996, collaborated with other scientists for a year at the Geoinstitut in Bayreuth, Germany.

Dad was also a keen singer, with perfect pitch and a deep contrabass voice, as well as an accomplished watercolour painter of mostly architectural subjects.

Desmond was born in Lisburn, Northern Ireland, the eldest of the four children of Samuel McConnell, the local primary school headteacher, and Cathleen (nee Coulter), a secretary. Inspired by the rocks of the landscape where he grew up, he studied geology at Queen’s University Belfast. In 1952 he went to Cambridge University to pursue a PhD, studying the rare minerals he had found, and the intense thermal metamorphism of sedimentary rocks in Ballycraigy, north of Larne. He married Jean Ironside in 1956, and they had three children, Craig, Elspeth and me.

Jean died in 2014, and Desmond’s two sisters, Margaret and Irene, also predeceased him. Desmond is survived by his children, four grandchildren, Patrick, Jessica, Leon and Alexandra, six great-grandchildren, and his brother John.