Historical Timeline
1892
Julius Stieglitz becomes one of the first chemists hired for the newly founded University of Chicago. He is instrumental in forming the university’s bond with Rush Medical College and contributes greatly to the field of organic chemistry.
1934
Harold Urey wins the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for discovering deuterium and proving the existence of heavy water.
1936
Karl Ziegler visits the University of Chicago as a visiting professor. Later, he is awarded the 1963 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on polymers.
1940
Herman Schlesinger and Herbert Brown (a graduate of both the College and the Department of Chemistry) discover sodium borohydride.
1942
The Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago is founded, as a cover for the Manhattan Project. Its director, Glenn Seaborg, discovers plutonium and several of the transuranic elements.
1949
Willard Libby leads a group that discovers radiocarbon dating, a technique that revolutionizes archeology. For his work, he is awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1960.
1950
Chemist Anthony Turkevich and physicist Enrico Fermi calculate for the first time the elements produced un the Big Bang.
1951
Glenn Seaborg wins the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of plutonium and other heavy elements.
1952
Harold Urey and his student Stanley Miller conduct the Miller-Urey experiment, which demonstrates that amino acids could have arisen from natural processes on the early Earth.
1961
Ilya Prigogine begins a five-year stint as a visitor to the Enrico Fermi Institute. He later wins the 1977 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his theory of dissipative structures.
1964
Cubane, a hypothesized molecule constructed of a cubic arrangement of carbon atoms, is synthesized for the first time in the lab of faculty member Philip Eaton. Until this point, cubane was thought to be impossible to synthesize.
1966
Robert Mulliken, an alumnus of the Department of Chemistry as well as a professor of both chemistry and physics at the University of Chicago, wins the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing the molecular orbital theory.
1971
Gerhard Herzberg, the former directory of spectroscopy at the University of Chicago’s Yerkes Observatory, wins the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his contributions to the knowledge of electronic structure and geometry of molecules.
1972
William Stein, onetime visiting professor at Chicago, wins the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for research into the connection between chemical structure and catalytic activity of the active center of ribonuclease.
1973
Robert Clayton leads a group that discovers that the chemistry of oxygen in meteorites is different from that in terrestrial rocks, a realization that allows scientists to use oxygen isotopes to understand the processes that formed the planets and asteroids following the birth of the solar system.
1979
Herbert Brown receives the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing an entirely new class of boron compounds, called boranes.
1983
Former chemistry chairman Henry Taube wins the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on mechanisms of electron transfer reactions.
1985
Richard Smalley, a former postdoctoral researcher at Chicago, helps to discover fullerenes, a new class of carbon molecules. He shares the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for this discovery in 1996.
1986
Yuan T. Lee, a former professor at Chicago, wins the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on crossed molecular beams.
1995
F. Sherwood Roland, an alumnus, and Paul Crutzen, a former professor of Geophysical Sciences, share the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their research on the ozone layer.
1999
Stuart Rice is awarded the National Medal of Science in recognition of his teaching, writing, and research.
2004
Robert Clayton is awarded the National Medal of Science for his work on cosmochemistry.
2004
Alumnus Irwin Rose shares in the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of ubiquitin-mediated protein degradation.