Harvard's Nobel Laureates in Chemistry

After earning his undergraduate degree from Harvard, Martin Karplus completed his Ph.D. at California Institute of Technology. In the 1970s, Martin Karplus, Michael Levitt, and Arieh Warshel successfully developed methods that combined quantum and classical mechanics to calculate the courses of chemical reactions using computers. They shared the 2013 Nobel prize.

Elias J. Corey received his undergraduate degree as well as his Ph.D. from MIT before joining the faculty at Harvard. Corey developed a new approach to producing organic substances. During his time at Harvard, Corey synthesised around 100 molecules, which previously had been only found in nature.

Dudley Herschbach did his undergraduate work at Stanford and earned a Ph.D. from Harvard. During his career he saw his early work on methods and theory of studying single collisions in chemical reactions move from the fringe to the mainstream. His most acclaimed work was his collaboration with Yuan T. Lee on crossed molecular beam experiments. He shared this Nobel prize with Yuan T. Lee and John C. Polanyi.

Walter Gilbert earned his undergraduate degree in physics and chemistry from Harvard and a Ph.D. from Cambridge University. His research focused on messenger RNA and how proteins are synthesized, and he co-developed a method for rapid DNA sequencing. His Nobel prize was shared with the biochemists Frederick Sanger and Paul Berg.

William Lipscomb earned a bachelor of science at the University of Kentucky and a Ph.D. in chemistry at the California Institute of Technology. His work focused on the composition of boranes, chemical compounds made from the basic elements boron and hydrogen. Using quantum mechanical calculations, was able to predict how they would react with other substances under different conditions.

Born and raised near Boston, Robert Burns Woodward earned a Ph.D. from MIT and then joined the faculty at Harvard. Woodward was responsible for the syntheses of chlorophyll, strychnine, cholesterol, lysergic acid, reserpine, and many other complex products.

Educated at home by his mother until the age of 14, T.W. Richards went on to earn three degrees from Harvard. During his graduate studies, je became interested in atomic weights and eventually discovered and redetermined, with great accuracy, the atomic weights of more than thirty important elements. As a result of his methods, sources of errors, including moisture in tests, were reduced.