Analytical & Physical Chemistry
Andrés Manuel del Río Fernández (1764-1849)
Andrés del Río studied analytical chemistry and metallurgy in Spain, where he was born. He received his bachelor's degree from the University of Alcalá de Henares in 1780. The government gave him a scholarship to enter the School of Mines in Almadén, Spain, where he showed great aptitude. Later he moved to Paris, where he studied under the chemist Jean Darcet. He continued his studies in Freiberg, Germany, under the direction of Abraham Gottlob Werner. In Freiberg he got to know Baron Alexander von Humboldt. He then returned to Paris as a student of Antoine Lavoisier. During the French Revolution Lavoisier, considered the founder of modern chemistry, was executed on the guillotine. Del Río was forced to flee to England. He also collaborated with Abbé René Just Haüy, considered the founder of crystallography.
In 1803, while examining mineral samples sent to him by the Purísima del Cardenal mine in Zimapán in the state of Hidalgo, del Río arrived at the conclusion that he had found a new metallic element. He had discovered compounds of Vanadium that were later confirmed in 1930 by Nils Gabrial Sefström.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andr%E9s_Manuel_del_R%EDo
Sir Humphry Davy (1778-1829)
Sir Humphry Davy, 1st Baronet was a Cornish chemist and inventor who invented the Davy lamp and a very early form of arc lamp. He is also remembered for isolating, by using electricity, a series of elements for the first time: potassium and sodium in 1807 and calcium, strontium, barium, magnesium and boron the following year, as well as for discovering the elemental nature of chlorine and iodine. Davy also studied the forces involved in these separations, inventing the new field of electrochemistry. Davy is also credited to have been the first to discover clathrate hydrates in his lab.
In 1799 he experimented with nitrous oxide and was astonished at how it made him laugh, so he nicknamed it "laughing gas" and wrote about its potential anaesthetic properties in relieving pain during surgery. In 1801, the Royal Institution in London engaged Davy as a public lecturer. Michael Faraday began attending Davy's lectures in 1810. In December, 1811, Faraday impressed Davy by sending him copious bound notes of these lectures, including exact drawing of Davy's apparatus. The previous October, Davy had been temporarily blinded by an explosion in his laboratory, and he needed help. He hired Faraday at once, beginning a close personal and professional association that lasted for years.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humphry_Davy; https://corrosion-doctors.org/Biographies/DavyBio.htm
Rachel Holloway Lloyd (1839–1900)
Rachel Holloway Lloyd is believed to be the first American woman to earn a Ph.D. in chemistry. Known for introducing beet sweetening agent as a sugar substitute, she was also the second woman to join the American Chemical Society in 1891.
To fulfill her dreams of teaching at a university, Lloyd traveled to Europe in 1884. In just two years at age 48, Lloyd was awarded a chemistry Ph.D. from the University of Zurich. Her dissertation was on high-temperature conversion of phenols (the active ingredient in sore throat sprays) to aromatic amines.
Lloyd began researching the sugar content of beets in the 1890s as part of an experimental program to determine whether beets could grow successfully in a northern climate. At the time, sugar beets were a new crop in the United States and important to the farm industry. Through careful analysis of the chemistry of sugar beets and Nebraska soil, Lloyd and her colleagues determined that beets could thrive in that relatively cool climate.
Emma P. Carr (1880-1972)
She began teaching chemistry at Mount Holyoke College in 1910. She became Chairman of the Chemistry department in 1913.
She was able to establish a research program studying the ultraviolet spectra of hydrocarbons, and established a link between the frequencies of the absorptions and the enthalpy change of combustion of the compound. She also participated in the International Critical Tables of the International Research Council, where she worked with Professor Victor Henri of the University of Zurich.
Carr was a worldwide leader in the use of the ultraviolet spectra of organic molecules as a means of investigating their electronic structures. She led one of the earliest collaborative research groups that involved faculty, graduate students, and undergraduate students.
Agnes Pockels (1862-1935)
As legend has it, Pockels discovered the influence of impurities on the surface tension of fluids doing the dishes in her own kitchen. Despite her lack of formal training, Pockels was able to measure the surface tension of water by devising an apparatus known as the slide trough, a key instrument in the new discipline of surface science. Using an improved version of this slide trough, American chemist Irving Langmuir made additional discoveries on the properties of surface molecules, which earned him a Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1932. Pockels' device is also a direct antecedent of the Langmuir–Blodgett trough, developed later by Langmuir and physicist Katharine Blodgett.
In 1891, with the help of Lord Rayleigh, Pockels published her first paper, "Surface Tension," on her measurements in the journal Nature. Thus began her career studying surface films. She never received a formal appointment, but she published a number of papers and eventually received recognition as a pioneer in the new field of surface science
Nina Vedeneyeva (1882-1955)
Born in 1882 in Tbilisi, Georgia (then part of the Russian Empire), Nina Vedeneyeva was a preeminent crystallographer. Her accolades include the Stalin Prize, the Order of Lenin, and several other medals awarded by the Soviet Union.
Vedeneyeva began her studies at the Liège Polytechnical School in Belgium but returned to Russia after only 1 year. After graduating from the chemistry department of the Bestuzhev Courses, a top women’s university, in 1913, she began to teach at the Second State University and the Institute of Fine Chemical Technology, both in Moscow.
She married a man, whom she later divorced, and later in life, she fell in love with the famed Russian lesbian poet Sophia Parnok. Over the course of their relationship, which lasted until Parnok’s death in 1933, Parnok wrote 32 poems inspired by Vedeneyeva.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nina_Vedeneyeva; https://cen.acs.org/people/lgbtq-scientist-chemist-history/99/web/2021/06?utm_source=Essential
Mary Winearls Porter (1886-1980)
Mary "Polly" Winearls Porter was an English crystallographer and geologist, known for her contributions to the English crystallography field and publications about ancient Roman architecture. She was one of the first people who studied the application of stones in cultural heritage as a legacy of physical artefacts, and intangible attributes inherited from past generations. Porter's extensive knowledge and contribution to her research can be said to have transformed this area of study into an established field of cross-disciplinary research.
Mary's father, Robert Porter, found that education was unnecessary for woman. Therefore, she received a basic education, but she never obtained a formal education during her childhood. Despite not attending school, a young Mary Porter became self-taught in the field of geology to gain a better understanding of the decorative stones that had once caught her eye. Porter went on to be an influential crystallographer. She encouraged other female researchers like Dorothy Hodgkin a pioneering female x-ray crystallographer and 1964 Nobel laureate in chemistry, who she mentored and worked with.
Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman (1888-1970)
Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman FRS 7 November 1888 – 21 November 1970) was an Indian physicist known for his work in the field of light scattering. Using a spectrograph that he developed, he and his student K. S. Krishnan discovered that when light traverses a transparent material, the deflected light changes its wavelength and frequency. This phenomenon, a hitherto unknown type of scattering of light, which they called "modified scattering" was subsequently termed the Raman effect or Raman scattering. Raman received the 1930 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery and was the first Asian to receive a Nobel Prize in any branch of science.
The Raman effect was discovered on 28 February 1928. The day is celebrated annually by the Government of India as the National Science Day. In 1954, the Government of India honoured him with the first Bharat Ratna, its highest civilian award. He later smashed the medallion in protest against Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru's policies on scientific research.
Anna Marie Farnsworth (1895-1991)
Miss Farnsworth held a Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Chicago that she earned in 1922. That was during an era when women were thought to be better off staying home and raising children. She never did that. Instead, she spent her life traveling the globe, digging in the earth to recover the history of other cultures. She spent most of her time in the ancient ruins of Athens, Greece. World War II interrupted her work and she went into teaching and then worked in chemical laboratories. She stood tall among men and excelled in whatever she did.
Farnsworth told the Star that she considered her two major achievements as her research on the technique of black Attic glaze, the findings were published in 1941, and the fifth-century intentional red glaze, published in 1958.In 1980 she was awarded the first Pomerance Award for Scientific Contributions to Archaeology given by the Archaeological Institute of America.
Source: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/77037371/anna-marie-farnsworth
Christina (Crissie) Cruickshank Miller (1899-2001)
Scottish Christina (Chrissie) Cruickshank Miller was a researcher and teacher at University of Edinburgh. Childhood measles and rubella damaged her hearing, which became progressively worse during her lifetime.
Miller’s research focused on microanalysis the reduction in scale of qualitative and quantitative analysis of inorganic materials a forerunner of green analytical chemistry. Miller received the Keith Prize from the Royal Society of Edinburgh and in 1949 was the first woman chemistry elected a Fellow of the Society.
Source: Image from www.chem.ed.ac.uk/alumni/get-informed/newsletter-issue-14/christina-miller-research-fellowship ; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christina_Miller ; American Science Language for chemistry at https://aslcore.org/
Erika Cremer (1900-1996)
Erika Cremer was a German physical chemist and Professor Emeritus at the University of Innsbruck who is regarded as one of the most important pioneers in gas chromatography, as she first conceived the technique in 1944. Cremer received her Ph.D. magna cum laude six years later in 1927 under Max Bodenstein. Her dissertation was on the kinetics of the hydrogen-chlorine reaction. The paper was published under her name only because it concluded that the hydrogen-chlorine reaction was a chain reaction, which was still considered an extremely original concept for that time.
At Innsbruck, Cremer researched the hydrogenation of acetylene and found difficulty separating two gases with similar adsorption heats using the common methods of the day. She was aware of the liquid absorption chromatography research going on at Innsbruck, so she thought of a parallel method to separate gases which used an inert carrier gas as the mobile phase. She developed mathematical relationships and equations and instrumentation for the first gas chromatograph. Separate components were detected by a thermal conductivity detector. She initially submitted a short academic paper in 1944 to Naturwissenschaften, which was accepted and she informed them that future experimental work would follow. The paper however was not published at the time, because the journal's printing press was destroyed during air bombardment. It was finally published thirty years later in 1976 at which point it was considered a historical document.
Kathleen Lonsdale (1903-1971)
Dame Kathleen Lonsdale was a British crystallographer who proved, in 1929, that the benzene ring is flat by using X-ray diffraction methods to elucidate the structure of hexamethylbenzene. She was the first to use Fourier spectral methods while solving the structure of hexachlorobenzene in 1931. During her career she attained several firsts for female scientists, including being one of the first two women elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1945 (along with Marjory Stephenson), first woman tenured professor at University College London, first woman president of the International Union of Crystallography, and first woman president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science.
Carolina Henriette MacGillavry (1904-1993)
In 1921 she began a study in chemistry at the University of Amsterdam, where she became interested in the (then) new field of quantum mechanics. She became a friend of J. M. Bijvoet, who interested her in crystallography which led to her 1937 PhD thesis on the subject. She then became assistant of A. E. van Arkel at Leiden, but Bijvoet asked her to come back to the Amsterdam crystallography laboratory that same year. Together with Bijvoet she did research in electromagnetic diffraction and its use in crystallography. She also did research in inorganic chemistry.
After World War II, Mac Gillavry was one of the developers of direct methods, an innovative calculus that could be used in crystallography. Due to her work on Harker Kasper inequalities, she became an international authority on the subject. In 1950 she became the first woman to be appointed to the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. In the same year she became a professor at the University of Amsterdam.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolina_Henriette_MacGillavry; Image by: http://www.clanmacgillavry.nl/clanmg/carolina-mac-gillavry
Mary Elliott Hill (1907-1969)
Mary Elliott Hill was one of the earliest African-American women to become a chemist. She was known as both an organic and analytical chemist. Hill worked on the properties of ultraviolet light, developing analytic methodology, and, in collaboration with her husband Carl McClellan Hill, developing ketene synthesis which supported the development of plastics. She is believed to be one of the first African-American women to be awarded with a master's degree in chemistry. Hill was an analytical chemist, designing spectroscopic methods and developing ways to track the progress of the reactions based on solubility.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Elliott_Hill; https://cen.acs.org/people/profiles/Six-black-chemists-should-know/97/web/2019/02
Sibyl M. Rock (1909-1981)
Sibyl Martha Rock was a pioneer in mass spectrometry and computing. Rock was a key person in Consolidated Engineering Corporation's (CEC) mass spectrometry team at a time when mass spectrometers were first being commercialized for use by researchers and scientists. Rock was instrumental in developing mathematical techniques for analyzing the results from mass spectrometers, in developing an analog computer with Clifford Berry for analysis of equations, and in sustaining an ongoing dialog between engineers and customers involved in development of both the mass spectrometer and an early digital computer, CEC's Datatron.
Dorothy Mary Hodgkin (1910-1994)
Dorothy Hodgkin was awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for solving the atomic structure of molecules such as penicillin and insulin, using X-ray crystallography. Generous, humble and hard-working throughout her half-century long career, she was undeterred by the rheumatoid arthritis that affected her from her late twenties.
She advanced the technique of X-ray crystallography, a method used to determine the three-dimensional structures of crystals. Among her most influential discoveries are the confirmation of the structure of penicillin as previously surmised by Edward Abraham and Ernst Boris Chain, and the structure of vitamin B12, for which she became the third woman to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_Hodgkin; https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-51399835; https://royalsociety.org/topics-policy/diversity-in-science/scientists-with-disabilities/dorothy-hodgkin/
James Ellis LuValle (1912-1993)
James Ellis Lu Valle was an Olympian and a chemist. During the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, Lu Valle won the bronze medal in the 400 m race. This was the Olympics in which Jesse Owens took home four gold medals while Adolf Hitler watched. That same year, Lu Valle earned his bachelor’s degree in chemistry from the University of California, Los Angeles. The university later named a student center after him, making Lu Valle the first student to have his name grace a UCLA building.
After teaching at Fisk University, a historically Black institution in Nashville, Tennessee, Lu Valle became the first Black person to work for Eastman Kodak. Later in his career, he became director of physical and chemical research at Smith-Corona Marchant in Palo Alto, California. When the company closed, Stanford University asked Lu Valle to lead the first-year chemistry lab, and he agreed, ending his career by returning to education and mentorship.Throughout his career, his specialties were photochemistry, electron diffraction, magnetic resonance, solid state physics, and neurochemistry. His research on color photography resulted in three U.S. patents.
Source: https://cen.acs.org/people/profiles/Six-black-chemists-should-know/97/web/2019/02; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_LuValle
Kenichi Fukui (1918-1998)
In chemical reactions, molecules composed of atoms meet and form new compounds. Electrons orbiting around the atoms' nuclei play an important role here. In 1952, Kenichi Fukui developed a theory that showed that the properties of the orbits of electrons that are most weakly bonded to the atom are critically important in understanding chemical reactions. In later, more developed theories, Kenichi Fukui and Roald Hoffmann proved independently of one another how the symmetrical properties of electron orbitals explain the course of chemical reactions.
Source: https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/1981/fukui-facts.html
Dorothy Martin Simon (1919-2016)
Simon’s career as a research chemist began at DuPont, where she developed new catalysts that gave filaments distinctive properties. Her work led to the synthesis of the revolutionary fabrics Orlon and Dacron. Later, as a chemist at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, she isolated a new isotope of calcium. She went on to research posts at the Argonne National Laboratory and the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA, the precursor of NASA). In 1956 she joined AVCO Corp., where she rose to vice president for research and development, becoming the company’s first female corporate officer.
While working at NACA’s Lewis Flight Propulsion Laboratory, Simon conducted and directed research on methods for the measurement of flames. Her inquiries into the fundamental properties of flames and the mechanism of flame propagation led to advances in the field of combustion theory. An early advocate of performance-based fire safety, she was called on to testify on the importance of balancing safely, cost, and functionality.
Isabella Karle (1921-2017)
Karle worked on the Manhattan Project during World War II, where she developed techniques to extract plutonium chloride from a mixture containing plutonium oxide.
She joined the United States Naval Research Laboratory after the end of the war. Karle advanced the practical uses of the work her husband, Nobel Prize winner Jerome Karle, did on using X-ray scattering techniques to directly determine the structure of crystals, a technique that is used to study the biological, chemical, metallurgical and physical characteristics, allowing processes to be designed to duplicate the molecules being studied. This technique has played a major role in the development of new pharmaceutical products and other synthesized materials. She was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1993.
Gopalasamudram Narayanan Rachandran (1922-2001)
Gopalasamudram Narayanan Ramachandran, or G.N. Ramachandran, was an Indian physicist who was known for his work that led to his creation of the Ramachandran plot for understanding peptide structure. He was the first to propose a triple-helical model for the structure of collagen. He subsequently went on to make other major contributions in biology and physics.
He was awarded the prestigious Jawarharlal Nehru Fellowship in 1968 for research on Protein and Polypeptide Conformation, he was one of its first recipients. Ramachandran can be credited for bringing together into the one field of molecular biophysics the then disparate fields of X-ray crystallography, peptide synthesis, NMR and other optical studies, and physico-chemical experimentation. In 1970, he founded the Molecular Biophysics Unit at the Indian Institute of Science which was later known as the Centre of Advanced Study in Biophysics.
Kathryn Hach-Darrow (1922-2020)
A child of the Great Depression, Kathryn (Kitty) Hach-Darrow watched her family struggle to recover after they lost their car dealership. She knew that keeping things afloat meant getting creative. So she raised and sold a flock of turkeys to pay for her freshman year of college. And years later, when her husband, the chemist Clifford Hach, invented a new water-analysis system, she set out to create the market for it.
By introducing chemistry to the field of water analysis, the Hach Chemical Company could guarantee safe, clean drinking water in town after town throughout the United States. But people had to know about the new technology first.
While also raising the couple’s three children, Hach-Darrow pioneered a direct-mail campaign that radically expanded the company; she even piloted her own plane to promote the analysis kits and distribute them to remote towns. Before retirement, Hach-Darrow guided the company to its current status as a global leader in water-purification technology.
Source: https://www.sciencehistory.org/women-in-chemistry; Image by Science History Institute, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=33465580
Helen M. Free (1923-2021)
Helen M. Free and her husband, Alfred Free (1913–2000), developed a revolutionary testing method for diabetes and other disease that today gives patients an inexpensive way to help manage illness. The invention, a chemically coated dip-and-read stick, measures key indicators of disease by changing color when dipped in a urine sample.
When she completed her degree in 1944, Free was offered a position testing the quality of vitamin ingredients in the control lab of Miles Laboratories (now part of Bayer) in Elkhart, Indiana, known for its main consumer product, Alka-Seltzer. One of the team’s first projects was to further develop Clinitest®, a tablet for testing glucose levels in the urine of diabetes patients. It was the first diagnostic test that could be done in a doctor’s office or a hospital without elaborate laboratory facilities.
Source: https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/education/whatischemistry/women-scientists/helen-m-free.html
Albert Antoine (1925-2017)
Albert began his career as a Control Chemist at the Pentone Company in New Jersey in 1947, taught chemistry at the post-secondary level at Clark College in Atlanta, during the 1953/1954 school year, and later taught at Cleveland State University from 1963 until 1970. From 1954 to 1983, Antoine was also employed at the NASA Lewis Research Center in Cleveland. There he researched jet and rocket propulsion, project management, and technical management for contracts and grants.
From 1983 to 1996, Antoine was Senior Research Associate, in the College of Engineering for Cleveland State University at the NASA Lewis Research Center. Over the years, his professional activities have included service on intergovernmental technical review and technical evaluating committees, membership in the American Chemical Society and publishing and lecturing on his research.
Source: https://aaregistry.org/story/albert-antoine-nasa-scientist-and-chemistry-teacher/
Martha J. B. Thomas (1926-2006)
Martha Thomas began her professional career in 1945 at Sylvania Electric Products, where she became the Head of the Phosphor Research and Development Section in 1970. During her time at Sylvania she established their first phosphor pilot plants. She also taught chemistry in Boston University's evening division between 1952 and 1970. She was a director of technical services at GTE Electrical Products Group in Danvers, Massachusetts, USA.
Martha Thomas held over 20 patents for improving lighting technology and manufacturing, covering for example fluorescent lamps and phosphor chemistry. One of her most important contributions was the development of a white phosphorus powder coating for fluorescent tubes creating a much more daylight-like light. She also developed a phosphor-based treatment that increase the brightness of mercury lamps by 10%.
Alma Levant Hayden (1927-1967)
Alma Levant Hayden was an American chemist, and one of the first African-American women to gain a scientist position at a science agency in Washington, D.C. She joined the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the 1950s.
Hayden came to national attention in 1963 when she led the team that exposed the common substance in Krebiozen, a long-controversial alternative and expensive drug promoted as anti-cancer.
Hayden joined the National Institute of Arthritis and Metabolic Diseases at the National Institute of Health. In the mid-1950s Hayden moved to the FDA, where she may have been the first person of color to work at the Agency. In 1963, Hayden became Chief of the Spectrophotometer Research Branch in the Division of Pharmaceutical Chemistry.
Source: https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/education/whatischemistry/women-scientists/alma-levant-hayden.html; https://cen.acs.org/people/profiles/Six-black-chemists-should-know/97/web/2019/02 ; https://www.sciencebuddies.org/blog/black-history-month-scientists
Joyce Jacobson Kaufman (b. 1929)
Joyce Jacobson Kaufman is a Jewish American chemist. In 1972 she introduced the concept of conformational topology and applied it to biomedical molecules. Kaufman also published a landmark paper in 1980 in which she described a new theoretical method for coding and retrieving certain carcinogenic hydrocarbons. She was invited by NSF to use the Cray X-MP (1985) and YMP (1989) supercomputers at the San Diego Supercomputer Center.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joyce_Jacobson_Kaufman
Mildred Dresselhaus (1930-2017)
Dresselhaus was particularly noted for her work on graphite, graphite intercalation compounds, fullerenes, carbon nanotubes, spin-orbit coupling in semiconductors, and low-dimensional thermoelectrics. Her group made frequent use of electronic band structure, Raman scattering and the photophysics of carbon nanostructures. Her research helped develop technology based on thin graphite which allow electronics to be "everywhere," including clothing and smartphones.
Her research has been instrumental in the development of the nanotechnology field, and her work has earned her the nickname “Queen of Carbon.” Dresselhaus herself has spent much of her career promoting the participation of women in science, and received the 2010 American Chemical Society (ACS) Award for Encouraging Women into Careers in the Chemical Sciences.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mildred_Dresselhaus; https://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/medalofscience50/dresselhaus.jsp
Elmer Lucille Allen (b. 1931)
Elmer Lucille Allen was born in August 1931 to Elmer Johnson Hammonds and Ophelia Guinn Hammonds. She grew up during segregation in the Russell neighborhood of West Louisville, and attended Western Elementary, Madison Junior High, and Central High School. At the age of nine, she was already blazing trails and demonstrating an entrepreneurial, artistic spirit. Having sold the most Girl Scout cookies in her troop, she and some of her original art were featured in Louisville Courier-Journal.
Elmer Allen was the first African American chemist to work at Brow- Forman Distillers Corporation. She worked to analyze raw products that grow into making whiskey, corn rye, and malt. She worked at Brown-Forman for 31 years before retiring in 1997, rising from junior to senior chemist along the way. And before she retired, she had already started on another path that would bring her accolades and success as well as healing and enjoyment – that of an artist.
Source: https://www.whas11.com/article/news/local/black-history/elmer-lucille-allen-brown-forman-chemist-louisville-black-history-month/417-3cbfabd2-2cf6-4c31-9821-183b24f214e0; https://americanwhiskeymag.com/2021/11/08/elmer-lucille-allen-interview/
Mary Lowe Good (1931-2019)
As a chemistry professor, Good pioneered an experimental technique called Mössbauer spectroscopy, which uses gamma rays to figure out the molecular structure of complicated compounds containing metal ions. With this technology she could learn in an afternoon what previously would have taken an entire year of study.
Although she was happy in her lab, when Universal Oil Products wooed her, she agreed to become the company’s director of research and work on innovative technologies. Finally, she took her talents to the national stage, advising on science and technology under presidents Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and Bill Clinton.
Source: https://www.sciencehistory.org/women-in-chemistry; Image by Science History Institute, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=38232363.
Carol Hollingworth Collins (1931-2022)
Professor Carol Collins graduated in Chemistry from Bates College (1952) and obtained her PhD in Organic Physical Chemistry from Iowa State University of Science and Technology (1958), when she was introduced to the recently developed gas–liquid chromatography. She conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Wisconsin and later worked on radiochemistry and nuclear medicine at the Brookhaven National Laboratory and the Western New York Nuclear Research Center in Louvain (Belgium) and Southwest Asia.
Professor Collins came to the State University of Campinas (Unicamp) with her husband, Kenneth Collins, in July 1974, during the university’s first decade, and played a leading role in consolidation of the Institute of Chemistry at Unicamp and in the growth of chemistry and analytical chemistry in Brazil. Her first line of research in Brazil was radioanalytical chemistry, later focusing on chromatographic techniques, initially applied to the products of radiochemical reactions and radiation chemistry. Subsequently, her attention was directed to the preparation of stationary phases for liquid chromatography. She gained remarkable achievement in the area of chromatography that allowed her to publish two books that are very popular in Brazil: “Introduction to Chromatographic Methods” (1987) and “Fundamentals of Chromatography” (2006).
For her outstanding performance and leadership in the creation and consolidation of the Analytical Chemistry Division of the Brazilian Chemical Society, her name was recognized in the Carol Collins Medal given to each National Meeting of Analytical Chemistry since the 2018 edition.
Source: https://tinyurl.com/2p8zy3b4
Martin Gouterman (1931-2020)
Martin Gouterman, an out gay man at a time when few scientists were open about their sexuality, discovered why blood is red and grass is green.
Gouterman was born on Dec. 26, 1931, and died Feb. 22, 2020, at 88. He was a University of Washington chemist who became an expert in porphyrins, large ring molecules consisting of four smaller rings formed by four carbons and a nitrogen. They’re essential to much of life, helping form both the red hemoglobin in blood and the green chlorophyll in plants. In 1963, Gouterman, then at Harvard University, and his colleagues developed a model of porphyrins’ physics to explain the molecules’ properties. His four-orbital model describes metallic porphyrins as having two highest occupied molecular orbitals that have nearly the same energy levels, or are “near-degenerate,” and two exactly degenerate lowest unoccupied molecular orbitals.
Source: https://cen.acs.org/people/lgbtq-scientist-chemist-history/99/web/2021/06?utm_source=Essential; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Gouterman
James Andrew Harris (1932-2000)
James Andrew Harris is the first African American to participate in a major new-element identification program. He was also a co-discoverer of elements 104 and 105. Unlike his colleagues, Harris did not have a doctoral degree, however, he was later awarded an honorary Ph.D. from Houston-Tillotson College in 1973 and two Merit Awards—one from the Mayor of Richmond, CA, and the other from the National Urban League.
Mostafa El-Sayed (b. 1933)
Mostafa A. El-Sayed (Arabic: مصطفى السيد) is an Egyptian-American physical chemist, a leading nanoscience researcher, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a US National Medal of Science laureate. He was the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Physical Chemistry during a critical period of growth. He is also known for the spectroscopy rule named after him, the El-Sayed rule.
El-Sayed and his research group have contributed to many important areas of physical and materials chemistry research. El-Sayed's research interests include the use of steady-state and ultra fast laser spectroscopy to understand relaxation, transport and conversion of energy in molecules, in solids, in photosynthetic systems, semiconductor quantum dots and metal nanostructures. The El-Sayed group has also been involved in the development of new techniques such as magnetophotonic selection, picosecond Raman spectroscopy and phosphorescence microwave double resonance spectroscopy. A major focus of his lab is currently on the optical and chemical properties of noble metal nanoparticles and their applications in nanocatalysis, nanophotonics and nanomedicine. His lab is known for the development of the gold nanorod technology.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mostafa_El-Sayed; https://chemistry.gatech.edu/faculty/el-sayed/
Oktay Sinanoğlu (1935-2015)
“Sinanoğlu’s greatest scientific contributions were in the 1960s, when he developed a theory of the electronic structure of molecules,” said Yale Sterling Professor of Chemistry John Tully. “Whereas the behavior of electrons is governed by the Schroedinger Equation, this equation is essentially impossible to solve except for systems with very few electrons. The difficulty is that, in contrast to what is taught in introductory chemistry classes, electrons do not move independently in their own orbitals. Rather, they interact with each other such that their motions are correlated. Methods to address this ‘election correlation’ problem are still being developed today. Sinanoğlu’s early work represents an important step toward the goal of developing accurate approximations to the electronic Schroedinger Equation.”
Source: https://news.yale.edu/2015/04/20/memoriam-oktay-sinano-lu-renowned-theoretical-chemist
Yuan Tseh Lee (b. 1936)
Yuan T. Lee was one of three who shared the 1986 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Although Lee's childhood in Taiwan was interrupted by World War II, once it resumed he led a full school life that included being second baseman on the baseball team, a member of the little league national championship ping-pong team, and trombone player in the band—all while getting top grades. He earned his B.S. and M.S. in Taiwan and then moved to the U.S. and Berkeley to work on a Ph.D. It was at Berkeley where he became interested in the study concerning the dynamics of chemical elementary processes that would lead to his Nobel Prize. He has taught at the University of Chicago and Berkeley and has received the National Medal of Science and the U.S. Department of Energy's Ernest O. Lawrence Award. He renounced his U.S. citizenship in 1994 to take a post in Taiwan where he has become politically active.
Source: https://www.infoplease.com/people/yuan-t-lee; Image by: https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/1986/lee-bio.html
William M. Jackson (b. 1936)
Chemist and academic administrator William M. Jackson was born in Birmingham, Alabama. He received his B.S. and Ph.D. degrees in chemistry from Morehouse College in 1956 and Catholic University of America, CUA in 1961, respectively. His expertise is in photochemistry, lasers chemistry, and astrochemistry.
In the field of astrochemistry, Jackson observed comets with both ground-based and satellite telescopes and used laboratory and theoretical studies to explain how the radicals observed in comets are formed. He led the team that made the first satellite (IUE) telescope cometary observation. His laboratory developed tunable dye lasers to detect and determine the properties of free radicals formed during the photodissociation of stable molecules. He continued to use lasers in the laboratory to map out the excited states of small molecules important in comets, planetary atmospheres, and the interstellar medium decompose into reactive atoms and radicals and are important in the chemistry of these astronomical bodies. Jackson published over 176 scientific papers, has a United States patent, and has edited two books. He is one of the six founders of NOBCChE; and in 1996, the Planetary Society named asteroid 1081 EE37 as (4322) Billjackson in his honor for contributions to planetary science.
Source: https://www.thehistorymakers.org/biography/william-jackson; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_M._Jackson_(chemist); https://cen.acs.org/careers/diversity/50-years-NOBCChE/100/i27?utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=Social&utm_campaign=CEN
William Guillory (b. 1938)
Professor William Guillory was born on December 4, 1938 in New Orleans, Louisiana to Merix and Agatha Guillory. He attended Joseph A. Craig Elementary School and graduated from Joseph A. Clark High School. Guillory received his B.A. degree in chemistry and physics and graduated magna cum laude from Dillard University in New Orleans, Louisiana in 1960. He received his Ph.D degree in chemical physics from University of California, Berkeley, and a National Science Foundation Fellowship to complete postgraduate studies at the University of Paris, The Sorbonne in 1964.
In 1965, Guillory served as assistant professor of chemistry at Howard University until 1969 and became associate professor of chemistry at Drexel University. In 1974, he joined the faculty at the University of Utah and served as chair of the chemistry department from 1980 to 1984. He also co-founded the National Organization for the Professional Advancement of Black Chemists and Chemical Engineers (NOBCChE) in 1972. Guillory also held lecturer and visiting professor positions at Atlanta University, the University of Bielefield in Germany and was awarded the Ralph Metcalfe Chair at Marquette University in 1982, and received the Chancellor’s Distinguished Lectureship at University of California, Berkeley and was selected Ad Honorem professor of chemistry at the University of Puerto Rico, San Juan in 1983. Guillory also received an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship and an Alexander von Humbolt Senior Scientist appointment at the University of Frankfurt.
Source: https://www.thehistorymakers.org/biography/william-guillory; https://workforcediversitynetwork.com/william-guillory; https://cen.acs.org/careers/diversity/50-years-NOBCChE/100/i27?utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=Social&utm_campaign=CEN
Barbara Askins (b. 1939)
Barbara S. Askins is best known for her invention of a method to enhance underexposed photographic negatives. This development was used extensively by NASA and the medical industry, and it earned Askins the title of National Inventor of the Year in 1978.
Askins is a physical chemist who worked for NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center and is best known for her pioneering invention of a process in which "images on developed photographic emulsions can be significantly intensified by making the image silver radioactive and exposing a second emulsion to this radiation." Askins' invention also led to significant advances in the field of medical technology. In particular, Askins' method prompted improvements in the development of X-ray images. Medical images that were 96 percent underexposed suddenly become readable; this meant that doctors could dramatically decrease the amount of X-ray radiation they gave to patients when running routine or emergency tests.
John W. Macklin (b. 1939)
Macklin refined the technique of Raman spectrometry to test very small sample sizes. Raman spectroscopy, named after its Indian inventor, uses a laser beam passed through a sample of material to determine the identity of the atoms in its molecules and how they combine.
In the 1980's, Macklin collaborated with NASA scientists to analyze meteorites and cosmic dust particles looking for complex carbon-based molecules to elucidate the evolution of Earth's carbon-based life. He showed that tiny crystals in clay could adsorb carbon molecules and facilitate the action of the sun's energy to combine into them into larger ones. Macklin has also extended Raman spectrometry to the study environmental pollution. He is currently teaching at the University of Washington.
Source: https://aaregistry.org/story/john-macklin-chemist-born/; https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/john-w-macklin-1939/
Ada Yonath (b. 1939)
Ada E. Yonath is an Israeli crystallographer best known for her pioneering work on the structure of the ribosome. She is the current director of the Helen and Milton A. Kimmelman Center for Biomolecular Structure and Assembly of the Weizmann Institute of Science.
In 2009, she received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry along with Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Thomas A. Steitz for her studies on the structure and function of the ribosome, becoming the first Israeli woman to win the Nobel Prize out of ten Israeli Nobel laureates, the first woman from the Middle East to win a Nobel prize in the sciences, and the first woman in 45 years to win the Nobel Prize for Chemistry.
Isiah Warner (b. 1946)
Isiah Manuel Warner is the Boyd and Phillip W. West Professor of Surface and Analytical Chemistry and the Vice President for Strategic Initiatives at Louisiana State University. He’s also a professor at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Warner has won numerous national and international awards for chemistry and mentoring of students in the sciences. He has published over 350 refereed publications and has several patents.
Warner is an analytical/materials Chemist, with research focuses on fluorescence spectroscopy, organized media, and ionic liquid chemistry, particularly as applied to solid phase materials.[9] He is known for his mentoring of Chemistry students, and focus on the advancement of women and chemists of color. He has won numerous awards for his mentoring including. He has graduated 67 PhD students from his group, including a significant number of women and minorities, helping to make Louisiana State University the leader in producing women and African American PhD students.[
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isiah_Warner; https://www.thehistorymakers.org/biography/isiah-m-warner-40
Faiza Al-Kharafi (b. 1946)
Faiza al-Kharafi was born in Kuwait and earned a BSc degree from Ain Shams University in Egypt, MSc and PhD degrees from Kuwait University. A Kuwait University Professor of Chemistry and served as the first female president of Kuwait University from 1993 to 2002. She is a member of the Board of Directors of Kuwait Foundation for the Advancement Sciences (KFAS). She holds a record of high productivity in several areas of corrosion science and engineering such as; the electrochemical behavior of vanadium, niobium, aluminum and their respective alloys, cadmium, copper, brass, cobalt, molybdenum and low carbon steel, which all have been examined under controlled conditions. In addition, she has employed her expertise in several major studies on the impact of corrosion on commonly used systems in the State of Kuwait, including crude oil distillation units, engine cooling systems, tap water, high temperature geothermal brines, corrosion in polluted water as well as metal corrosion due to pollution.
She was awarded the 2006 Kuwait Prize in Applied Sciences. For her work on corrosion, a problem of fundamental importance to water treatment and the oil industry, she was awarded the 2011 L’Oreal-UNESCO Awards for Women in Science. Professor al-Kharafi is currently Vice-President of the Academy of Sciences for the Developing World. In 2005 Forbes magazine named her as one of “The 100 Most Powerful Women – Women To Watch In The Middle East”.
Source: https://cnre.mit.edu/people/advisory-board/al-kharafi
Ahmed Zewail (1946-2016)
Chemical reactions in which molecules held together by atoms meet and reorganize into new compounds are one of nature's most fundamental processes. This transition from one constellation to another happens very quickly. The process is possible because the atoms inside a molecule vibrate. The time between these vibrations is very short - 10-100 femtoseconds. In the late 1980s Ahmed Zewail developed methods for studying chemical reactions in detail. By using laser technology to produce flashes of light just a few femtoseconds long, reactions can be mapped.
He was awarded the 1999 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on femtochemistry and became the first Egyptian to win a Nobel Prize in a scientific field. He was the Linus Pauling Chair Professor of Chemistry, Professor of Physics, and the director of the Physical Biology Center for Ultrafast Science and Technology at the California Institute of Technology.
Source: https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/1999/zewail-facts.html; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmed_Zewail
Odile Eisenstein (b. 1949)
Odile Eisenstein is a theoretical chemist who specializes in modelling the structure and reactivity of transition metals and lanthanide complexes. She is currently the equivalent of an Emeritus Professor at the Institut Charles Gerhardt Montpellier, équipe CTMM at Montpellier 2 University. She has been a member of the French Academy of Sciences since 2013.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odile_Eisenstein; Image by: http://www.ctcc.no/people/professor-ii/eisenstein/
Purnendu K. Dasgupta (b. 1949)
Dasgupta was born in India. Dasgupta's father and grandfather were also university teachers. He got his Bachelor's degree in chemistry from a college run by Irish missionaries. He was selected as scholar in the National Talent Search Examination. He completed his Masters in the University of Burdwan and served as research scholar in the Department of Physical Chemistry at the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science.
In 1973, he went to United States and attended Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge as a graduate student in electrochemistry. In 1977, he received his PhD in analytical chemistry with a minor in electrical engineering under Philip W. West. In 1981, he joined Texas Tech as a professor. In 1992 he became a Paul Whitfield Horn Professor, the highest distinction at Texas Tech, named after the first President of the University. In 2007, he joined the University of Texas at Arlington as Jenkins Garrett Professor and Chair. He has since been elected an adjunct faculty member both in Departments of Physics and Electrical Engineering. Since 2015, he has occupied the Hamish Small Chair in Ion Analysis, endowed by Thermo Fisher Scientific.
Source: https://www.depts.ttu.edu/chemistry/Seminars/Dasgupta/index.php; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purnendu_Dasgupta; https://www.uta.edu/academics/faculty/profile?username=dasgupta
Ligia Gargallo
Pioneer in the development of polymer and macromolecules chemistry. Data published as a result of Professor Gargallo’s studies helps drug designers visualize how new compounds will interact with enzymes in the body and opens the door to the rational design of synthetic enzymes. Professor at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. L'Oreal-Unesco Award "Women in Science" 2007 and the National Award for Natural Sciences 2014.
Source:https://twitter.com/LatinXChem/status/1278052728183287808, http://webarchive.loc.gov/all/20150412060238/http://portal.unesco.org/science/en/ev.php-URL_ID=5212&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html
Geraldine L. Richmond (b. 1953)
Richmond is the Presidential Chair in Science and Professor of Chemistry at the University of Oregon (UO). She conducts fundamental research to understand the chemistry and physics of complex surfaces and interfaces. These understandings are most relevant to energy production, atmospheric chemistry and remediation of the environment. Throughout her career she has worked to increase the number and success of women scientists in the U.S. and in many developing countries in Africa, Asia and South America. Richmond has served as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and she received the 2013 National Medal of Science. She was named the Priestley Medalist in 2018.
Source: https://cen.acs.org/articles/95/i24/Geraldine-Richmond-named-2018-Priestley-Medalist.html; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geraldine_L._Richmond
Joseph S. Francisco (b. 1955)
In 2009, Joseph S. Francisco became the second African American to be elected president of the American Chemical Society. Also former president of the National Organization for the Professional Advancement of Black Chemists and Chemical Engineers, Francisco is the William E. Moore Distinguished Professor at Purdue University. He has published more than 400 journal articles, written nine book chapters, co-authored the textbook Chemical Kinetics and Dynamics, and served on numerous national science councils. Francisco's recent achievements include an appointment by President Barack Obama to the distinguished National Medal of Science Committee and an honorary doctor of science degree from Tuskegee University.
Source: https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/education/whatischemistry/african-americans-in-sciences/joseph-s--francisco.html; Image by https://chem.unl.edu/joseph-s-francisco
Koichi Tanaka (b. 1959)
For mass spectrometry analyses of a macromolecule, such as a protein, the analyte must be ionized and vaporized by laser irradiation. The problem is that the direct irradiation of an intense laser pulse on a macromolecule causes cleavage of the analyte into tiny fragments and the loss of its structure. In February 1985, Tanaka found that by using a mixture of ultra fine metal powder in glycerol as a matrix, an analyte can be ionized without losing its structure. His work was filed as a patent application in 1985, and after the patent application was made public reported at the Annual Conference of the Mass Spectrometry Society of Japan held in Kyoto, in May 1987 and became known as soft laser desorption (SLD).
He shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2002 for developing a novel method for mass spectrometric analyses of biological macromolecules with John Bennett Fenn and Kurt Wüthrich (the latter for work in NMR spectroscopy).
Eleanor Campbell (b. 1960)
Eleanor was born and went to school on the Island of Bute, Scotland and then studied Chemical Physics at Edinburgh University. After her PhD at Edinburgh University, during which she studied energy transfer in fast atom - molecule collisions under the supervision of Dr. M.A.D. Fluendy, she went as a postdoc to Germany and spent over 12 years there (at the Free University, Berlin; Freiburg University and the Max-Born-Institute in Berlin).
She received a Habilitation in Experimental Physics from Freiburg University in 1992. Her research interests during the time in Germany covered alignment and orientation studies in atom-ion collisions, cluster collisions, spectroscopy and collisions of fullerenes, laser desorption mass spectrometry, ns laser ablation of polymers and fs laser ablation of dielectrics. In 1998, Eleanor was appointed to the Chair of Atomic and Molecular Physics at Gothenburg University in Sweden where her group investigated gas phase fullerene dynamics, cluster-surface collisions and the growth , device fabrication and nanoelectromechanical properties of carbon nanotubes.
Eleanor Campbell was appointed to the Chair of Physical Chemistry at the University of Edinburgh in 2007 and then appointed to the Chair of Chemistry in 2013.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleanor_Campbell_(scientist); http://www.ecampbell.chem.ed.ac.uk/group-members/eleanor-campbell
Monica Olvera de la Cruz
Monica Olvera de la Cruz is a soft-matter theorist, the Lawyer Taylor Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and Professor of Chemistry, and by courtesy Professor of Physics and Astronomy and of Chemical and Biological Engineering at Northwestern University.
Olvera de la Cruz has developed novel methods to analyze complex systems, and in particular molecular electrolytes. She explained the limitations associated with separating long DNA chains via gel electrophoresis dynamics, which was of great importance to the Human Genome Project.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monica_Olvera_de_la_Cruz
Edgar Arriaga
Guatemalan-born Edgar Arriaga (he/him/él) was a first-generation college student. He is now a Professor of Chemistry at the University of Minnesota and self-identifies as a cis-Latinx gay man.
Arriaga’s research develops microfluidic, capillary electrophoretic, fluorescence and inductively coupled-mass spectrometric methods to characterize chemical, biochemical, and physio-logical properties of single cells and their sub-cellular components.
Arriaga was lead author of the Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Respect (DEIR) Guidelines for Bachelor Degrees for the American Chemical Society and co-founded the Diversity and Inclusivity Alliance at the University of Minnesota.
Source: Image from https://arriaga.chem.umn.edu/; https://500queerscientists.com/edgar-arriaga/?ids=[6043]; Video at www.youtube.com/watch?v=ht__bHEVxYQ; DEIR Guidelines J. Chem. Ed. 2022, 99, 393.
Elena Stashenko (b. 1958)
Elena Stashenko is a Russian chemist , researcher and teacher who has developed a large part of her career in Colombia . She In 2020 she was included in the list of the sixty most influential scientists in the world by the British magazine The Analytical Scientist . That same year she received the Order of the Congress of the Republic of Colombia, in the rank of Knight.
Between 1975 and 1981, Stashenko studied chemistry at the Peoples' Friendship University of Russia , where she obtained a PhD in Instrumental Analysis, Chromatography and Mass Spectrometry in 1989. She has been associated with other university institutions in California , Brunswick , Quebec and Australia doing postdoctoral stays.
Stashenko is the director of the National Research Center for the Agro-industrialization of Tropical Aromatic and Medicinal Plant Species (CENIVAM). She has published more than 200 scientific articles on chemistry and the like in specialized journals and has been a member of Colciencias and the Humboldt Institute . She has also served on the editorial board of the Journal of Separation Science , Scientia Chromatographica , and the Journal of Essential Oil Research.
Source: Ihttps://es-m-wikipedia-org.translate.goog/wiki/Elena_Stashenko?_x_tr_sl=es&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=sc; https://theanalyticalscientist.com/power-list/2020/south-america/elena-stashenko; https://cen.acs.org/people/awards/ACS-FLAQ-present-2022-Latin/100/web/2022/11?utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=Social&utm_campaign=CEN
Y. Shrike Zhang
At Brigham & Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Zhang develops model human tissues and organ mimics called organoids to predict people's responses to drugs and help personalize medicine. He focuses on improving every aspect of such systems, including the biofabrication techniques that grow the tissues, the microfluidics that supply them with nutrients, and the analytical methods needed to monitor their health.
Instead of just culturing cells, Zhang is working on direct printing of tissues with so-called bioinks—mixtures of cells and biomaterials that can be used in three-dimensional printers. The 3-D bioprinting lets him control where cells are deposited to build an organoid. "It's more robust and flexible, and it potentially gives you higher reproducibility," he says.
Source: https://cen.acs.org/biological-chemistry/tissue-engineering/Y-Shrike-Zhang/96/i33
Livia Schiavinato Eberlin
Livia Schiavinato Eberlin is a Brazilian scientist and now professor at University of Texas at Austin and the Baylor College of Medicine. Her work focuses on the innovative ways that doctors can identify cancerous tissue in patients.
In 2017 she created the MasSpec Pen, which helps doctors quickly tell the difference between healthy and cancerous tissues in surgery. Her MasSpec Pen was featured an episode of the TV show Grey’s Anatomy.
She was awarded the 2018 MacArthur 'Genius' grant and the 2019 Arthur F. Findeis Award from the American Chemical Society.
Source: https://fierce.wearemitu.com/fierce-boss-ladies/two-of-the-2018-macarthur-genius-grants-went-to-latinas/ ; https://www.bcm.edu/people-search/livia-eberlin-20756; Harris and Lucy, Quantitative Chemical Analysis, 10th ed.
Renã A. S. Robinson
Renã A. S. Robinson is an associate professor and the Dorothy J. Wingfield Phillips Chancellor’s Faculty Fellow in the Department of Chemistry at the Vanderbilt University, where she is the principal investigator for the RASR Laboratory.
Robinson is recognized as an emerging leader in proteomics and the study of Alzheimer's disease and aging. She has developed a novel multiplexing strategy for quantitative proteomics called cPILOT. She has received a number of awards, including the 2017 Pittsburgh Conference Achievement Award.
Source: https://www.vanderbilt.edu/chemistry/faculty/robinson.php
Anthony Tran
Dr. Anthony Tran was the director of a Washington DC lab testing blood samples for Zika virus.
In reviewing lab tests for the past six month he was troubled by the last 409 tests all being negative. Dr. Tran investigated and found a dilution error that caused the tests to not respond to Zika.
Experimental error is the topic of the next three chapters, which will help you develop the invaluable analytical mindset displayed by Dr. Tran.