Professor Wentrup is one of the leading experts worldwide in the field of flash vacuum thermolysis (FVT). He has contributed very substantially to the knowledge of carbene and nitrene chemistry and is without doubt Australia's leading expert in this field. He has developed the coupling of FVT with matrix isolation spectroscopy of reactive intermediates and used this technique to characterize a wide variety of new intermediates (first direct observation of thermally produced nitrenes, of dehydrodiazepines, of dinitrogen sulfide, and of the HCN dimer N-cyanomethanimine; first IR-spectroscopic observation of ketene-pyridine ylides; discovered the oxoketene-oxoketene and analogous rearrangements; first syntheses of iminopropadienones RN=C=C=C=O).