AWARDS >> KIRKWOOD AWARD
Kirkwood Award
John Gamble Kirkwood
The Kirkwood Award celebrates the life and work of John Gamble Kirkwood, 1907-1959, former Sterling Professor of Chemistry and Chair of the Chemistry Department at Yale University. This award is conferred every two years for “outstanding research contributions, theorectical or experimental, in the physical Sciences.”
Since the award was initiated in 1962, thirteen of the twenty-seven recipients subsequently have won the Nobel Prize.
John G. Kirkwood obtained his Ph.D. from MIT in 1929, when he was only 22. After several years of postdoctoral research, mostly on his own, he began an academic career at Cornell as assistant professor. Chicago lured him away for a couple of years, but he returned to Cornell as Todd Professor in 1938. He moved to Caltech as Noyes Professor in 1947, and finally to Yale in 1951.
Kirkwood’s research interests were broad and his mastery of the field of physical chemistry profound.
“Kirkwood’s scientific explorations ranged from quantum chemistry to biopolymers. His greatest impact derived from his elegant and far reaching applications of statistical mechanics to condensed systems and his development of methodology for predicting equilibrium and transport properties of solutions.”
KIRKWOOD AWARD WINNERS
1962 Professor Lars Onsager * Yale University
1963 Professor Manfred Eigen * Max Planck Institut
1964 Professor Robert S. Mulliken * University of Chicago
1965 Professor Robert B. Woodward * Harvard University
1966 Professor Henry Taube * Stanford University
1967 Professor Joseph E. Mayer University of California, San Diego
1969 Professor Neil Bartlett University of California, Berkeley
1971 Professor Paul Flory * Stanford University
1973 Professor Sune Bergstrom * Karolinska Institute, Sweden
1976 Professor Albert Eschenmoser Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule, Zurich
1978 Professor F. Albert Cotton Texas A&M University
1980 Professor E. J. Corey * Harvard University
1982 Professor Bruno Zimm University of California, San Diego
1984 Professor Earl Muetterties University of California, Berkeley
1986 Professor Richard N. Zare Stanford University
1989 Professor Richard R. Ernst * Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule, Zurich
1991 Professor Ryoji Noyori * Nagoya University, Japan
1994 Professor John A. Pople * Northwestern University
1996 Professor Ahmed Zewail * California Institute of Technology
1998 Professor Peter B. Dervan California Institute of Technology
2002 Dr. Ad Bax National Institutes of Health
2005 Professor Robert H. Grubbs * California Institute of Technology
2008 Professor JoAnne Stubbe Massachusetts Institute of Technology
2010 Professor Peter G. Schultz Scripps Research Institute
2013 Professor W. E. Moerner Stanford University
2016 Professor Jennifer Doudna University of California, Berkeley
2018 Professor Charles M. Lieber Harvard University
2020 Professor John F. Hartwig University of California, Berkeley
* Nobel laureates
