Chemists

221 chemists who shaped the science, from alchemy to today’s laureates.

221 chemists

Ancient and medieval

Jabir ibn Hayyan (Geber)≈ 721–≈ 815Iraq
Medieval alchemist traditionally credited with early laboratory methods such as distillation and crystallization; who wrote the works attributed to him is debated.

Born in the 1600s

Robert Boyle1627–1691Ireland
Formulated Boyle’s law relating gas pressure and volume and, in The Sceptical Chymist, argued for an experimental, particle-based view of matter.

Born in the 1700s

Joseph Black1728–1799United Kingdom
Identified carbon dioxide as “fixed air” and introduced the concepts of latent heat and specific heat.
Henry Cavendish1731–1810United Kingdom
Isolated hydrogen (“inflammable air”) and showed that water is formed when it burns.
Joseph Priestley1733–1804United Kingdom
Isolated oxygen in 1774 and studied many gases, including ammonia, sulfur dioxide and carbon dioxide.
Carl Wilhelm Scheele1742–1786Sweden
Discovered oxygen independently of Priestley, along with chlorine, manganese and several organic acids.
Antoine Lavoisier1743–1794France
Established the law of conservation of mass, explained combustion as combination with oxygen and helped create modern chemical nomenclature.
John Dalton1766–1844United Kingdom
Proposed the modern atomic theory, in which each element consists of atoms of a characteristic mass, and stated the law of partial pressures.
Amedeo Avogadro1776–1856Italy
Proposed that equal volumes of gases at the same temperature and pressure contain equal numbers of molecules.
Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac1778–1850France
Discovered the law of combining volumes of gases, helped isolate boron and improved volumetric analysis.
Humphry Davy1778–1829United Kingdom
Pioneered electrochemistry and isolated potassium, sodium, calcium, magnesium and other elements by electrolysis.
Jöns Jacob Berzelius1779–1848Sweden
Introduced modern chemical symbols, determined accurate atomic weights and discovered cerium, selenium and thorium.
Michael Faraday1791–1867United Kingdom
Discovered benzene and formulated the laws of electrolysis, laying foundations of electrochemistry.

Born in the 1800s

Friedrich Wöhler1800–1882Germany
Synthesized urea from inorganic starting materials in 1828, undermining the idea of a special “vital force” in organic chemistry.
Justus von Liebig1803–1873Germany
Developed methods of organic elemental analysis, established the teaching-laboratory model and pioneered agricultural chemistry and fertilizers.
Robert Bunsen1811–1899Germany
Developed spectroscopic analysis with Kirchhoff, discovering caesium and rubidium, and popularized the Bunsen burner.
Louis Pasteur1822–1895France
Discovered molecular chirality by separating tartrate crystals, showed that fermentation is caused by microorganisms and developed vaccines.
Stanislao Cannizzaro1826–1910Italy
Revived Avogadro’s hypothesis at the 1860 Karlsruhe congress, settling atomic weights and paving the way for the periodic table.
August Kekulé1829–1896Germany
Founded structural theory (carbon is tetravalent and forms chains) and proposed the ring structure of benzene.
Dmitri Mendeleev1834–1907Russia
Published the periodic table in 1869, ordering elements by atomic weight and predicting the properties of elements not yet discovered.
Adolf von Baeyer1835–1917Germany
Synthesized indigo, studied dyes and the strain in small rings, and founded a great school of organic chemistry.Nobel Chemistry 1905
Josiah Willard Gibbs1839–1903United States
Founded chemical thermodynamics, introducing free energy, chemical potential and the phase rule.
Otto Wallach1847–1931Germany
German chemist who elucidated the structures of terpenes and alicyclic compounds, founding the scientific basis of the essential-oil and perfume industry.Nobel Chemistry 1910
Emil Fischer1852–1919Germany
Determined the structures of sugars and purines, synthesized glucose and peptides and proposed the lock-and-key picture of enzymes.Nobel Chemistry 1902
Henri Moissan1852–1907France
Isolated elemental fluorine in 1886 and developed the electric arc furnace for high-temperature chemistry.Nobel Chemistry 1906
Jacobus Henricus van ’t Hoff1852–1911Netherlands
Won the first Nobel Prize in Chemistry; founded stereochemistry with the tetrahedral carbon atom and advanced chemical kinetics and osmotic pressure theory.Nobel Chemistry 1901
William Ramsay1852–1916United Kingdom
Discovered the noble gases neon, krypton and xenon, co-discovered argon and identified helium on Earth.Nobel Chemistry 1904
Wilhelm Ostwald1853–1932Germany
Made fundamental contributions to catalysis, chemical equilibrium and reaction rates, and developed the Ostwald process for nitric acid.Nobel Chemistry 1909
Paul Sabatier1854–1941France
French chemist at the University of Toulouse who opened the field of metal-catalysed hydrogenation of organic compounds.Nobel Chemistry 1912
Svante Arrhenius1859–1927Sweden
Proposed the theory of electrolytic dissociation and the Arrhenius equation for the temperature dependence of reaction rates.Nobel Chemistry 1903
Eduard Buchner1860–1917Germany
German chemist who proved that fermentation is driven by enzymes rather than living cells, opening the era of modern biochemistry.Nobel Chemistry 1907
Walther Nernst1864–1941Germany
Formulated the Nernst equation for electrode potentials and the third law of thermodynamics.Nobel Chemistry 1920
Arthur Harden1865–1940United Kingdom
British biochemist who showed that alcoholic fermentation by yeast juice needs both enzymes and a small-molecule coenzyme, opening the study of metabolic intermediates.Nobel Chemistry 1929
Richard Adolf Zsigmondy1865–Austria, Germany
Austrian-German chemist who founded modern colloid chemistry and co-invented the ultramicroscope to observe colloidal particles.Nobel Chemistry 1925
Alfred Werner1866–1919Switzerland
Created coordination chemistry, explaining the structure of metal complexes through primary and secondary valences.Nobel Chemistry 1913
Marie Curie1867–1934Poland, France
Discovered polonium and radium, pioneered the study of radioactivity and was the first person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences.Nobel Physics 1903Nobel Chemistry 1911
Fritz Haber1868–1934Germany
Developed the synthesis of ammonia from nitrogen and hydrogen, the basis of modern fertilizers; his role in chemical warfare remains deeply controversial.Nobel Chemistry 1918
Theodore William Richards1868–1928United States
Harvard analytical chemist, the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, famed for exact atomic-weight measurements.Nobel Chemistry 1914
Fritz Pregl1869–1930Slovenia, Austria
Austrian chemist who transformed quantitative organic analysis by scaling it down to milligram samples.Nobel Chemistry 1923
Ernest Rutherford1871–1937New Zealand, United Kingdom
Discovered the atomic nucleus, identified alpha and beta radiation and achieved the first artificial nuclear transmutation.Nobel Chemistry 1908
Victor Grignard1871–1935France
French chemist who created the organomagnesium compounds now called Grignard reagents, a cornerstone of carbon–carbon bond formation.Nobel Chemistry 1912
Richard Willstätter1872–1942Germany
German organic chemist who studied alkaloids and plant pigments; his analysis of chlorophyll and pioneering use of chromatography earned the 1915 Nobel Prize, and he was a founder of enzyme chemistry.Nobel Chemistry 1915
Hans von Euler-Chelpin1873–1964Sweden, Germany
German-born Swedish biochemist who clarified the chemistry of enzymes and coenzymes in the fermentation of sugar.Nobel Chemistry 1929
Carl Bosch1874–1940Germany
Scaled the Haber process up to industrial production and pioneered high-pressure chemical engineering.Nobel Chemistry 1931
Gilbert N. Lewis1875–1946United States
Proposed the shared electron-pair bond and Lewis structures, and defined acids and bases as electron-pair acceptors and donors.
Adolf Windaus1876–1959Germany
German chemist who clarified the constitution of sterols and founded the chemistry of vitamin D.Nobel Chemistry 1928
Otto Diels1876–1954Germany
German chemist who developed the Diels–Alder reaction, a cornerstone of ring-forming synthesis.Nobel Chemistry 1950
Francis William Aston1877–1945United Kingdom
British physicist and chemist at Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory who invented mass spectrography and discovered isotopes of stable elements.Nobel Chemistry 1922
Frederick Soddy1877–1956United Kingdom
Showed with Rutherford that radioactive decay transmutes elements and introduced the concept of isotopes.Nobel Chemistry 1921
Heinrich Otto Wieland1877–1957Germany
German chemist who unravelled the structure of bile acids and thereby laid the foundations of steroid chemistry.Nobel Chemistry 1927
Otto Hahn1879–1968Germany
Discovered nuclear fission with Fritz Strassmann in 1938; Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch gave its physical explanation.Nobel Chemistry 1944
Hermann Staudinger1881–1965Germany
Established that polymers are long chains of covalently bonded molecules, founding macromolecular chemistry.Nobel Chemistry 1953
Irving Langmuir1881–1957United States
Pioneered surface chemistry, including adsorption and molecular monolayers, and refined the octet rule for chemical bonding.Nobel Chemistry 1932
Walter Norman Haworth1883–1950United Kingdom
British organic chemist who determined the ring forms of sugars — the basis of the Haworth projection — and achieved the first synthesis of vitamin C.Nobel Chemistry 1937
Friedrich Bergius1884–1949Germany
German chemist who pioneered high-pressure chemistry, converting coal into liquid fuel and wood into sugar.Nobel Chemistry 1931
Peter Debye1884–1966Netherlands, United States
Dutch-American physical chemist who laid the experimental and theoretical foundations of molecular structure determination, electrolyte theory and X-ray diffraction.Nobel Chemistry 1936
Theodor Svedberg1884–1971Sweden
Swedish physical chemist who built the ultracentrifuge and used it to prove that proteins are well-defined macromolecules.Nobel Chemistry 1926
George de Hevesy1885–1966Hungary, Sweden
Hungarian radiochemist who co-discovered hafnium and invented the isotopic tracer technique.Nobel Chemistry 1943
Robert Robinson1886–1975United Kingdom
British organic chemist who decoded the structures of morphine, strychnine and other alkaloids, and pioneered strategies of organic synthesis.Nobel Chemistry 1947
James B. Sumner1887–1955United States
American biochemist who in 1926 crystallized the enzyme urease from jack beans and proved it to be a pure protein — work initially doubted but honored with the 1946 Nobel Prize.Nobel Chemistry 1946
Leopold Ružička1887–1976Switzerland, Croatia
Croatian-born Swiss chemist who formulated the isoprene rule and first synthesized musk ketones and androsterone, founding the chemistry of terpenes and steroids.Nobel Chemistry 1939
Paul Karrer1889–1971Switzerland
Swiss organic chemist who determined the structures of carotenoids, flavins and vitamins A and B2, and achieved the synthesis of riboflavin.Nobel Chemistry 1937
Jaroslav Heyrovský1890–1967Czechia
Czech chemist, father of polarography, who founded the first school of electrochemical analysis in Prague.Nobel Chemistry 1959
John Howard Northrop1891–1987United States
American biochemist at the Rockefeller Institute whose crystallization of enzymes established that they are pure proteins, founding modern enzymology.Nobel Chemistry 1946
Harold Urey1893–1981United States
American physical chemist who discovered deuterium (Nobel 1934); he later pioneered isotope geochemistry and planetary science and directed the famous Miller–Urey experiment on the origin of life.Nobel Chemistry 1934
Artturi Ilmari Virtanen1895–1973Finland
Finnish biochemist whose fodder-preservation method transformed northern agriculture; Finland's only chemistry laureate.Nobel Chemistry 1945
William F. Giauque1895–1982United States
American chemist who pioneered magnetic cooling to reach temperatures near absolute zero and experimentally confirmed the third law of thermodynamics.Nobel Chemistry 1949
Nikolay Nikolaevich Semenov1896–1986Russia
Soviet physical chemist who created the theory of branched chain reactions, explaining explosions, combustion and oxidation kinetics.Nobel Chemistry 1956
Robert S. Mulliken1896–1986United States
Developed molecular orbital theory, describing bonding through orbitals spread over whole molecules.Nobel Chemistry 1966
Wallace Carothers1896–1937United States
Led the DuPont team that invented nylon and neoprene and developed the theory of condensation polymers.
Cyril Norman Hinshelwood1897–1967United Kingdom
British physical chemist who made reaction mechanisms and chain kinetics quantitative, later extending them to bacterial growth.Nobel Chemistry 1956
Georg Wittig1897–1987Germany
German organic chemist whose Wittig reaction gave synthesis a clean way to install C=C double bonds from carbonyls.Nobel Chemistry 1979
Odd Hassel1897–1981Norway
Norwegian chemist who founded conformational analysis, explaining how three-dimensional molecular shapes govern chemical behaviour.Nobel Chemistry 1969
Ronald G. W. Norrish1897–1978United Kingdom
British physical chemist whose flash photolysis made the fleeting intermediates of very fast reactions directly observable.Nobel Chemistry 1967
Karl Ziegler1898–1973Germany
Discovered organometallic catalysts that polymerize ethylene at low pressure; shared the prize with Giulio Natta.Nobel Chemistry 1963

20th century

Frédéric Joliot-Curie1900–1958France
French physicist-chemist, son-in-law of Marie Curie, who discovered artificial radioactivity and later led France's first atomic reactor programme.Nobel Chemistry 1935
Richard Kuhn1900–1967Austria, Germany
Austrian-German chemist who revealed the chemistry of carotenoid pigments and vitamins, and later headed the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Medical Research.Nobel Chemistry 1938
Linus Pauling1901–1994United States
Explained the nature of the chemical bond, introduced electronegativity and hybridization, and later campaigned against nuclear weapons testing.Nobel Chemistry 1954Nobel Peace 1962
Vincent du Vigneaud1901–1978United States
American biochemist who studied sulfur metabolism and biotin, then achieved the first synthesis of a peptide hormone, oxytocin.Nobel Chemistry 1955
Arne Tiselius1902–1971Sweden
Swedish biochemist who turned electrophoresis into a precise analytical method and used it to fractionate the proteins of blood serum.Nobel Chemistry 1948
Kurt Alder1902–1958Germany
German chemist who, with his teacher Otto Diels, discovered the cycloaddition of dienes and dienophiles — the Diels–Alder reaction — the most famous way to build six-membered rings.Nobel Chemistry 1950
Adolf Butenandt1903–1995Germany
German biochemist who pioneered the isolation and structural analysis of sex hormones.Nobel Chemistry 1939
Giulio Natta1903–1979Italy
Italian chemist who turned Ziegler catalysts into stereospecific polymerization, producing isotactic polypropylene; he shared the 1963 Nobel Prize with Karl Ziegler.Nobel Chemistry 1963
Lars Onsager1903–1976Norway, United States
Norwegian-American theoretical chemist famous for the reciprocal relations of irreversible thermodynamics and the exact solution of the two-dimensional Ising model.Nobel Chemistry 1968
Charles J. Pedersen1904–1989United States
American chemist of Norwegian-Japanese descent who spent his career at DuPont and discovered crown ethers, the first synthetic host molecules for metal ions.Nobel Chemistry 1987
Gerhard Herzberg1904–1999Canada, Germany
German-born Canadian scientist regarded as the founder of molecular spectroscopy; author of the classic four-volume spectra series.Nobel Chemistry 1971
Wendell Stanley1904–1971United States
American biochemist whose crystallization of a virus showed that infectious agents could be handled as pure chemicals.Nobel Chemistry 1946
Luis F. Leloir1906–1987Argentina
Argentine biochemist who discovered sugar nucleotides such as UDP-glucose and showed they carry sugars for building carbohydrates; the first Latin American chemistry laureate.Nobel Chemistry 1970
Vladimir Prelog1906–1998Croatia, Switzerland
Croatian-born Swiss chemist who gave organic stereochemistry its rigorous rules, including the Cahn–Ingold–Prelog notation.Nobel Chemistry 1975
Alexander Todd1907–1997United Kingdom
Scottish chemist whose synthesis of nucleotides and coenzymes laid the chemical foundation for understanding DNA, RNA and energy metabolism.Nobel Chemistry 1957
Edwin M. McMillan1907–1991United States
American nuclear chemist at Berkeley; discovered neptunium and, independently, conceived the synchrotron.Nobel Chemistry 1951
Willard Libby1908–1980United States
American chemist who invented carbon-14 dating, transforming how scientists measure the age of ancient materials.Nobel Chemistry 1960
Archer J. P. Martin1910–2002United Kingdom
British biochemist who co-invented partition chromatography, the foundation of paper and gas chromatography used in every modern laboratory.Nobel Chemistry 1952
Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin1910–1994United Kingdom
Used X-ray crystallography to determine the structures of penicillin, vitamin B12 and insulin.Nobel Chemistry 1964
Paul J. Flory1910–1985United States
Founded the physical chemistry of polymers, explaining chain statistics, solutions and gels.Nobel Chemistry 1974
Melvin Calvin1911–1997United States
American chemist who mapped the cyclic pathway by which plants fix CO₂ into sugars — the Calvin cycle — using the new tracer carbon-14.Nobel Chemistry 1961
William H. Stein1911–1980United States
American biochemist at the Rockefeller Institute who, with Stanford Moore, invented automated amino-acid analysis and mapped the active centre of ribonuclease.Nobel Chemistry 1972
Glenn T. Seaborg1912–1999United States
Co-discovered plutonium and other transuranium elements and proposed the actinide concept for the periodic table.Nobel Chemistry 1951
Herbert C. Brown1912–2004United States, United Kingdom
British-born American chemist at Purdue University; built modern boron chemistry and its synthetic reagents.Nobel Chemistry 1979
Stanford Moore1913–1982United States
Rockefeller biochemist who co-invented the automated amino-acid analyzer and dissected the structure–activity relationship of ribonuclease; Nobel Prize 1972.Nobel Chemistry 1972
Max Perutz1914–2002United Kingdom, Austria
Austrian-born British molecular biologist; founded the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology and solved the structure of haemoglobin.Nobel Chemistry 1962
Richard L. M. Synge1914–1994United Kingdom
British biochemist who, with Archer Martin, invented partition chromatography; they shared the 1952 Nobel Prize for a technique that revolutionized the separation and analysis of mixtures.Nobel Chemistry 1952
Henry Taube1915–2005United States, Canada
Canadian-born American chemist who revealed how electrons hop between metal complexes, defining inner- and outer-sphere transfer.Nobel Chemistry 1983
Christian B. Anfinsen1916–1995United States
American biochemist who proved that a protein's sequence alone dictates its folded shape, a cornerstone of molecular biology.Nobel Chemistry 1972
Herbert A. Hauptman1917–2011United States
American mathematician-chemist whose direct methods made X-ray crystal-structure determination routine for small molecules.Nobel Chemistry 1985
Ilya Prigogine1917–2003Belgium
Belgian chemist of Russian origin who extended thermodynamics to systems far from equilibrium, reshaping the understanding of order and complexity.Nobel Chemistry 1977
John Warcup Cornforth1917–2013Australia, United Kingdom
Australian-British chemist, deaf since youth, who unravelled the stereochemistry of enzymatic reactions and cholesterol biosynthesis.Nobel Chemistry 1975
John B. Fenn1917–2010United States
American chemist who turned mass spectrometry into a tool for proteins and macromolecules through electrospray ionisation.Nobel Chemistry 2002
John Cowdery Kendrew1917–1997United Kingdom
British biochemist who solved the first atomic-resolution protein structure, myoglobin, founding structural biology.Nobel Chemistry 1962
Robert Burns Woodward1917–1979United States
Master of total synthesis (quinine, strychnine, chlorophyll, vitamin B12) and co-author of the Woodward–Hoffmann rules.Nobel Chemistry 1965
William S. Knowles1917–2012United States
American chemist who pioneered catalytic asymmetric hydrogenation and enabled the industrial synthesis of L-DOPA.Nobel Chemistry 2001
Derek H. R. Barton1918–1998United Kingdom
British organic chemist who created conformational analysis; also known for the Barton reaction and work on natural-product synthesis.Nobel Chemistry 1969
Frederick Sanger1918–2013United Kingdom
Determined the amino-acid sequence of insulin and developed DNA sequencing; one of only two people to win the chemistry prize twice.Nobel Chemistry 1958Nobel Chemistry 1980
Jens C. Skou1918–2018Denmark
Danish physician-biochemist who discovered the Na⁺/K⁺-ATPase ion pump in 1957; for this first ion-transporting enzyme he received the 1997 Nobel Prize.Nobel Chemistry 1997
Jerome Karle1918–2013United States
American physical chemist who pioneered direct methods for determining crystal structures.Nobel Chemistry 1985
Kenichi Fukui1918–1998Japan
Developed frontier orbital theory, showing that the highest occupied and lowest unoccupied orbitals govern reactivity.Nobel Chemistry 1981
Paul D. Boyer1918–2018United States
American biochemist at UCLA who unravelled how the molecular machine ATP synthase makes the cell’s energy currency.Nobel Chemistry 1997
Donald J. Cram1919–2001United States
UCLA organic chemist who designed 'host' molecules that mimic enzyme recognition of guests; a founder of supramolecular chemistry and co-winner of the 1987 Nobel Prize.Nobel Chemistry 1987
William N. Lipscomb1919–2011United States
American chemist who decoded the structures and bonding of the boranes, founding the chemistry of electron-deficient compounds.Nobel Chemistry 1976
George Porter1920–2002United Kingdom
British physical chemist who co-invented flash photolysis, making it possible to observe free radicals and fleeting intermediates in real time.Nobel Chemistry 1967
Peter D. Mitchell1920–1992United Kingdom
British biochemist whose chemiosmotic theory explained how mitochondria and chloroplasts convert electron flow into a proton gradient that drives ATP synthesis.Nobel Chemistry 1978
Rosalind Franklin1920–1958United Kingdom
Produced X-ray diffraction images of DNA, including Photo 51, that were crucial for determining its double-helix structure.
Robert Bruce Merrifield1921–2006United States
American chemist who invented solid-phase peptide synthesis, turning the laborious assembly of peptides into an automated routine.Nobel Chemistry 1984
Geoffrey Wilkinson1921–1996United Kingdom
British chemist who co-founded organometallic sandwich chemistry and created Wilkinson's catalyst for homogeneous hydrogenation.Nobel Chemistry 1973
John B. Goodenough1922–2023United States
Identified oxide cathodes that made lithium-ion batteries practical and shared the 2019 prize.Nobel Chemistry 2019
Rudolph A. Marcus1923–2024Canada, United States
Canadian-born theoretical chemist whose electron-transfer theory explains redox processes from corrosion to photosynthesis.Nobel Chemistry 1992
Stephanie Kwolek1923–2014United States
Invented Kevlar, a para-aramid fibre far stronger than steel by weight, used in body armour and tyres.
Walter Kohn1923–2016United States, Austria
Founded density functional theory, which allows accurate electronic-structure calculations for large molecules and solids.Nobel Chemistry 1998
John Pople1925–2004United Kingdom
Developed computational methods and the Gaussian program that made quantum chemistry a practical tool for chemists.Nobel Chemistry 1998
Aaron Klug1926–2018United Kingdom, South Africa
Lithuanian-born British chemist who turned electron microscopy into a tool for solving the 3D structures of large biological complexes.Nobel Chemistry 1982
Irwin Rose1926–2015United States
American biochemist who co-discovered ubiquitin tagging, the cell's universal system for targeted protein destruction.Nobel Chemistry 2004
Paul Berg1926–2023United States
Stanford biochemist who created the first recombinant DNA molecule and helped write the safety guidelines for genetic engineering; Nobel Prize 1980.Nobel Chemistry 1980
Alan G. MacDiarmid1927–2007New Zealand, United States
New Zealand-American chemist who co-discovered that plastics can be made to conduct electricity.Nobel Chemistry 2000
George A. Olah1927–2017Hungary, United States
Hungarian-American chemist who made carbocations directly observable and later championed a methanol-based carbon cycle.Nobel Chemistry 1994
Manfred Eigen1927–2019Germany
German physical chemist, director at the Max Planck Institute in Göttingen, pioneer of fast-reaction kinetics and of the theory of molecular self-organization and evolution.Nobel Chemistry 1967
F. Sherwood Rowland1927–2012United States
American atmospheric chemist who traced the fate of CFCs and connected them to the destruction of stratospheric ozone.Nobel Chemistry 1995
Elias James Corey1928–United States
American chemist who turned organic synthesis into a logical science, inventing retrosynthetic analysis and completing dozens of landmark total syntheses.Nobel Chemistry 1990
Osamu Shimomura1928–2018Japan, United States
Japanese organic chemist who spent decades studying bioluminescent marine life at Princeton and Woods Hole.Nobel Chemistry 2008
John Charles Polanyi1929–Canada, Hungary
Hungarian-born Canadian chemist who pioneered reaction dynamics, observing how molecules share energy as they react.Nobel Chemistry 1986
Akira Suzuki1930–Japan
Japanese chemist who created the palladium-catalysed cross-coupling that bears his name.Nobel Chemistry 2010
Martin Karplus1930–United States, Austria
Shared the 2013 prize for multiscale models of complex chemical systems and gave the Karplus equation used in NMR.Nobel Chemistry 2013
Tu Youyou1930–China
Discovered artemisinin, an antimalarial drug from sweet wormwood, and won the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.Nobel Medicine 2015
Yves Chauvin1930–2015France
French chemist who deciphered how olefin metathesis works, enabling catalysts that reshuffle double bonds in synthesis and industry.Nobel Chemistry 2005
Richard F. Heck1931–2015United States
American chemist whose palladium-catalysed cross-coupling laid the groundwork for the carbon–carbon bond-forming reactions used throughout synthesis today.Nobel Chemistry 2010
Dudley R. Herschbach1932–United States
American physical chemist who pioneered crossed molecular beam experiments, letting chemists watch single reactive collisions and measure how products scatter.Nobel Chemistry 1986
Michael Smith1932–2000Canada, United Kingdom
British-born Canadian biochemist at the University of British Columbia who invented site-directed mutagenesis, a cornerstone technique of protein engineering.Nobel Chemistry 1993
Walter Gilbert1932–United States
American molecular biologist and physicist at Harvard who isolated the lac repressor, co-invented chemical DNA sequencing, and coined the term 'RNA world'.Nobel Chemistry 1980
Paul J. Crutzen1933–2021Netherlands
Dutch atmospheric chemist who explained ozone destruction by nitrogen oxides and later coined the term 'Anthropocene'.Nobel Chemistry 1995
Richard R. Ernst1933–2021Switzerland
Swiss chemist at ETH Zurich who transformed NMR spectroscopy into a high-resolution structural tool.Nobel Chemistry 1991
Robert Curl1933–2022United States
American chemist who co-discovered fullerenes, a new molecular form of carbon.Nobel Chemistry 1996
Ei-ichi Negishi1935–2021Japan, United States
Japanese-American chemist who developed organozinc-based palladium cross-coupling, a workhorse reaction for building carbon-carbon bonds.Nobel Chemistry 2010
Alan J. Heeger1936–United States
American physicist-chemist at UC Santa Barbara who co-discovered conducting polymers and pioneered organic photovoltaics and plastic electronics.Nobel Chemistry 2000
Gerhard Ertl1936–Germany
German physical chemist who founded modern surface science, resolving step by step how molecules adsorb, move and react on solid surfaces.Nobel Chemistry 2007
Hideki Shirakawa1936–Japan
Japanese polymer chemist who discovered electrically conductive plastics through iodine-doped polyacetylene.Nobel Chemistry 2000
Yuan T. Lee1936–Taiwan, United States
Taiwanese-American physical chemist; later president of Academia Sinica in Taipei.Nobel Chemistry 1986
Avram Hershko1937–Israel
Hungarian-born Israeli biochemist at the Technion who unravelled the ubiquitin system of protein degradation, central to cell cycle regulation and cancer biology.Nobel Chemistry 2004
Richard Robson1937–United Kingdom, Australia
In 1989 combined copper ions with a four-armed molecule to make the first porous crystal of the kind later called a metal–organic framework.Nobel Chemistry 2025
Roald Hoffmann1937–United States, Poland
Co-formulated the Woodward–Hoffmann rules on orbital symmetry in reactions and applied extended Hückel theory to inorganic and solid-state chemistry.Nobel Chemistry 1981
Robert Huber1937–Germany
German biochemist who solved the first atomic-resolution structure of a membrane protein: the photosynthetic reaction centre.Nobel Chemistry 1988
Kurt Wüthrich1938–Switzerland
Swiss biophysicist who turned NMR spectroscopy into a tool for solving the three-dimensional structures of proteins in solution.Nobel Chemistry 2002
Ryoji Noyori1938–Japan
Developed chiral catalysts for asymmetric hydrogenation, enabling efficient synthesis of single-handed molecules.Nobel Chemistry 2001
Tomas Lindahl1938–Sweden, United Kingdom
Swedish-British biochemist who revealed how cells continuously repair DNA against spontaneous chemical decay.Nobel Chemistry 2015
Ada E. Yonath1939–Israel
Israeli crystallographer who resolved the atomic structure of the ribosome, the cell's protein factory and a key antibiotic target.Nobel Chemistry 2009
Harold Kroto1939–2016United Kingdom
Co-discovered buckminsterfullerene (C₆₀), opening the field of fullerenes and carbon nanostructures.Nobel Chemistry 1996
Jean-Marie Lehn1939–France
Founded supramolecular chemistry, showing how molecules recognize each other and assemble.Nobel Chemistry 1987
Sidney Altman1939–2022Canada, United States
Canadian-American molecular biologist who showed that RNA can be catalytic, sharing the prize for the discovery of ribozymes.Nobel Chemistry 1989

Contemporary

Arieh Warshel1940–United States, Israel
Israeli-American computational chemist at USC, co-inventor of QM/MM methods and pioneer of computer simulation of enzymatic reactions.Nobel Chemistry 2013
Joachim Frank1940–United States, Germany
German-born American biophysicist at Columbia University who created single-particle reconstruction methods, making cryo-electron microscopy a routine structural-biology tool.Nobel Chemistry 2017
Thomas A. Steitz1940–2018United States
American biochemist who solved the structure of the ribosome, the cell's protein-synthesis machine, at atomic resolution.Nobel Chemistry 2009
K. Barry Sharpless1941–United States
Developed asymmetric oxidation catalysis and, with others, click chemistry; one of only two people to win the chemistry prize twice.Nobel Chemistry 2001Nobel Chemistry 2022
Dan Shechtman1941–Israel
Israeli materials scientist who discovered quasicrystals — ordered solids with 'forbidden' fivefold symmetry — forcing crystallography to redefine what a crystal is.Nobel Chemistry 2011
George P. Smith1941–United States
American biologist who invented phage display, a method to fish out useful peptides and antibodies from vast viral libraries.Nobel Chemistry 2018
John E. Walker1941–United Kingdom
British biochemist who revealed the structure of ATP synthase, the molecular turbine powering nearly all living cells.Nobel Chemistry 1997
M. Stanley Whittingham1941–United Kingdom, United States
British-American chemist who invented the rechargeable lithium battery through reversible ion intercalation.Nobel Chemistry 2019
J. Fraser Stoddart1942–2024United Kingdom, United States
Scottish-American supramolecular chemist who built rotaxanes and catenanes into working molecular machines.Nobel Chemistry 2016
Jacques Dubochet1942–Switzerland
Swiss biophysicist who discovered how to vitrify water around biomolecules for electron microscopy; he shared the 2017 Nobel Prize that launched the 'resolution revolution' of cryo-EM.Nobel Chemistry 2017
Robert H. Grubbs1942–2021United States
American chemist whose robust ruthenium catalysts made olefin metathesis a practical, everyday reaction of organic and polymer synthesis.Nobel Chemistry 2005
Johann Deisenhofer1943–Germany, United States
German-American biophysicist whose X-ray structure of the photosynthetic reaction centre opened structural studies of membrane proteins.Nobel Chemistry 1988
Louis E. Brus1943–United States
Columbia University physical chemist who made the first colloidal quantum dots at Bell Labs and explained their size-dependent electronic properties; shared the 2023 Nobel Prize.Nobel Chemistry 2023
Mario J. Molina1943–2020Mexico, United States
Mexican-born chemist who revealed how CFCs destroy stratospheric ozone, work that drove the global ban on those compounds.Nobel Chemistry 1995
Richard E. Smalley1943–2005United States
American chemist who co-discovered C₆₀ buckminsterfullerene and later championed carbon nanotubes, becoming a leading voice of nanotechnology.Nobel Chemistry 1996
Robert J. Lefkowitz1943–United States
American physician-scientist at Duke University who mapped the receptor system cells use to read hormones and drugs.Nobel Chemistry 2012
Jean-Pierre Sauvage1944–France
French supramolecular chemist at Strasbourg; pioneer of catenanes, knots and interlocked molecular machines.Nobel Chemistry 2016
Kary B. Mullis1944–2019United States
American biochemist who invented the polymerase chain reaction at Cetus Corporation; PCR became the indispensable tool for copying DNA and earned him the 1993 Nobel Prize.Nobel Chemistry 1993
Aleksey Yekimov1945–Russia
Russian physicist who first observed quantum-size effects in semiconductor nanocrystals embedded in glass, the discovery underlying quantum dots.Nobel Chemistry 2023
Richard Henderson1945–United Kingdom
Scottish structural biologist whose work on membrane proteins proved electron microscopy could reach atomic resolution without crystals.Nobel Chemistry 2017
Richard R. Schrock1945–United States
American chemist who built the first well-defined metal-carbene catalysts for olefin metathesis and pioneered dinitrogen fixation chemistry.Nobel Chemistry 2005
Ahmed Zewail1946–2016Egypt, United States
Pioneered femtochemistry, using ultrashort laser pulses to watch bonds break and form in real time.Nobel Chemistry 1999
Aziz Sancar1946–Türkiye, United States
Turkish-American biochemist who mapped nucleotide excision repair — how cells cut out UV-damaged DNA segments — and linked it to the circadian clock.Nobel Chemistry 2015
Paul Modrich1946–United States
American biochemist who deciphered how cells repair mismatched DNA bases after replication.Nobel Chemistry 2015
Aaron Ciechanover1947–Israel
Technion physician-biochemist who, with Avram Hershko and Irwin Rose, unravelled how cells tag and destroy proteins via ubiquitin; shared the 2004 Nobel Prize.Nobel Chemistry 2004
Martin Chalfie1947–United States
American neurobiologist who made GFP glow in living cells, launching fluorescent tagging as biology's most used tool.Nobel Chemistry 2008
Michael Levitt1947–United States, United Kingdom, Israel
South-African-born computational chemist who pioneered computer simulation of proteins and multiscale molecular modeling; he shared the 2013 Nobel Prize and works at Stanford.Nobel Chemistry 2013
Roger Kornberg1947–United States
American structural biologist who revealed the molecular basis of eukaryotic transcription; son of Nobel laureate Arthur Kornberg.Nobel Chemistry 2006
Thomas Cech1947–United States
American biochemist who discovered catalytic RNA, reshaping molecular biology and ideas about the origin of life.Nobel Chemistry 1989
Akira Yoshino1948–Japan
Created the first commercially viable lithium-ion battery, using a carbon-based anode.Nobel Chemistry 2019
Hartmut Michel1948–Germany
German biochemist who achieved the first crystallization of a membrane protein and solved the structure of the photosynthetic reaction centre.Nobel Chemistry 1988
Peter Agre1949–United States
American physician-scientist at Johns Hopkins; discovered the water-channel proteins aquaporins.Nobel Chemistry 2003
Ben Feringa1951–Netherlands
Built the first light-driven molecular motor and shared the 2016 prize for the design of molecular machines.Nobel Chemistry 2016
Gregory P. Winter1951–United Kingdom
British molecular biologist who harnessed phage display to evolve antibodies in vitro, leading to blockbuster human antibody drugs.Nobel Chemistry 2018
Susumu Kitagawa1951–Japan
Showed that gases can flow in and out of porous coordination polymers and predicted that such frameworks could be made flexible.Nobel Chemistry 2025
Roger Y. Tsien1952–2016United States
UC San Diego chemist who turned GFP into a rainbow of fluorescent probes for living cells; he also designed calcium indicators and shared the 2008 Nobel Prize.Nobel Chemistry 2008
Venkatraman Ramakrishnan1952–United Kingdom, India, United States
Indian-born structural biologist at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, later president of the Royal Society, who solved the structure of the ribosome's small subunit.Nobel Chemistry 2009
William E. Moerner1953–United States
American physical chemist who opened single-molecule spectroscopy and helped make optical microscopy see beyond the diffraction limit.Nobel Chemistry 2014
Morten Meldal1954–Denmark
Danish chemist at the University of Copenhagen; developed peptide and click chemistry methods that changed synthesis.Nobel Chemistry 2022
Brian K. Kobilka1955–United States
American physician-scientist who crystallised GPCRs, the receptor family targeted by a third of all medicines.Nobel Chemistry 2012
Frances Arnold1956–United States
Pioneered the directed evolution of enzymes, using laboratory evolution to create new biocatalysts.Nobel Chemistry 2018
Roderick MacKinnon1956–United States
American biophysicist and physician who showed, atom by atom, how ion channels select and conduct potassium.Nobel Chemistry 2003
Koichi Tanaka1959–Japan
Japanese engineer-chemist at Shimadzu who made mass spectrometry usable for large, fragile biomolecules.Nobel Chemistry 2002
Eric Betzig1960–United States
American physicist-inventor whose PALM microscope turned fluorescence imaging into a nanometre-scale tool for cell biology.Nobel Chemistry 2014
Moungi G. Bawendi1961–United States, France, Tunisia
French-Tunisian-American chemist at MIT whose synthesis made quantum dots a practical, tunable material.Nobel Chemistry 2023
David Baker1962–United States
Pioneered computational protein design and won half of the 2024 chemistry prize; the other half went to Hassabis and Jumper for AlphaFold.Nobel Chemistry 2024
Stefan W. Hell1962–Germany
German physicist-chemist who invented STED microscopy, letting light microscopes see inside living cells at nanometre resolution.Nobel Chemistry 2014
Jennifer Doudna1964–United States
Co-developed CRISPR–Cas9 as a programmable gene-editing tool with Emmanuelle Charpentier.Nobel Chemistry 2020
Omar Yaghi1965–United States, Jordan
Made stable metal–organic frameworks and showed they can be designed rationally, founding reticular chemistry.Nobel Chemistry 2025
Carolyn Bertozzi1966–United States
Founded bioorthogonal chemistry: reactions that proceed inside living systems without disturbing them.Nobel Chemistry 2022
Benjamin List1968–Germany
German chemist who co-founded asymmetric organocatalysis, a third pillar of catalysis alongside metals and enzymes.Nobel Chemistry 2021
David W. C. MacMillan1968–United Kingdom, United States
Scottish-American chemist who co-founded organocatalysis, using small chiral organic molecules instead of metals or enzymes to drive asymmetric reactions.Nobel Chemistry 2021
Emmanuelle Charpentier1968–France
Discovered tracrRNA and co-developed CRISPR–Cas9 gene editing with Jennifer Doudna.Nobel Chemistry 2020
Demis Hassabis1976–United Kingdom
Co-led the development of AlphaFold, the AI system that predicts protein structures, and shared the 2024 chemistry prize.Nobel Chemistry 2024
John Jumper1985–United States
Co-developed AlphaFold at DeepMind and shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.Nobel Chemistry 2024