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Saint Elmo Brady (1844-1966)
- A physical organic chemist and the first African American to receive a Ph.D. in the United States.
- His thesis was on divalent oxygen atom, a research focused on sorting out the scientific conflict of idea between his supervisor and a Harvard University chemist Arthur Michael, who does not agree on the fact that the acidity of carboxylic acids is affected by replacing hydrogen atoms on the carbon chain with other chemical groups. Brady’s research work was in agreement with the idea.
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Lewis Howard Latimer (1848–1928)
- He was a Black American inventor born by Black slave parents.
- Manufactured the carbon filament that made the light bulb a useful device.
- He invented the evaporative air conditioner.
- Improved toilet system for railroad cars.
- Wrote the first book on electric lighting and helped to patent the telephone.
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Dr Takamine Jōkichi (1854-1922)
- A Japanese born chemist with focus on agriculture.
- Isolated the enzyme known as Takadiastase which catalyses the breakdown of starch from a fungus used in the manufacture of soy sauce and miso.
- The first to isolated adrenaline hormone which is now called epinephrine from the suprarenal gland of an animal in 1901. This discovery has contributed strongly in the advancement of the treatment of asthma.
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Professor Acharya Sir Prafulla Chandra Ray (1861-1944)
- Born in the eastern part of India presently known as Bangladesh.
- Established the first modern Indian chemistry research school and is popularly known as the father of chemical sciences in India.
- The founder of India’s first pharmaceutical company, Bengal Chemical and Pharmaceuticals.
- His publication in the late 18th century on the preparation of a new stable compound mercurous nitrate led to further research exploring the nitrates.
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George Washington Carver (1864– 1943)
- An African American Agricultural Organic chemist
- Invented methods to prevent soil depletion.
- Promoted alternative crops to cotton.
- He was the most prominent black scientist of the early 20th century and spent many of his working and promoting products from peanuts.
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Sir Dr. Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman (1888-1970)
- Contributed to the field of light scattering.
- An Indian physicist known for using a spectrograph that he developed to discover that when light traverses a transparent material, the deflected light changes its wavelength and frequency. This phenomenon which is recognised as a fundamental spectroscopy technique is known as Raman effect or Raman scattering.
- He won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1930.
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Alice Ball (1892-1916)
- An African American scientist.
- Known for her discovery of the ‘Ball Method’ which was the most effective in the treatment for Leprosy in the 20th century.
- She extracted the ethyl esters from chaulmoogra oil which she modified chemically to make them water-soluble. This modification to the ethyl esters make them easily absorbed by the bloodstream.
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Percy Lavon Julian (1899-1975)
- A renowned African American Chemist
- the first to synthesize the physostigmine (a natural product).
- He also championed the synthesis of human hormones. (Progesterone and testosterone) from plant steroids on an industrial large scale.
- His works were focused on synthesis of natural products e.g. He synthesised steroids intermediates from Mexican wild yams.
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Mary Elliott Hill (1907 – 1969)
- An organic and analytical chemist and one of the earliest African American women to become a chemist.
- Worked on developing analytical methodology and properties of UV light.
- Worked to develop spectroscopic methods and using solubility to track the progress of chemical reactions.
- She worked in collaboration with her husband to develop the ketene synthesis which contributed strongly to the development of plastics.
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Professor Julian Banzon (1908-1988)
- A Philippine born chemist.
- He discovered from his experiments on organic materials from his native homeland (Philippines), are good sources to produce alternative fuels called ethyl esters fuels. This discovery can strongly contribution to transformations in fuel technologies.
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Walter Lincoln Hawkins (1911 –1992)
- An African American chemist and engineer who is known as the father of polymer chemistry.
- He strongly contributed in designing a long-lasting plastic for telephone cables which lead to the introduction of telephone services to the remote American communities.
- Hawkins is also remembered for his efforts and contributions in advocating for minority students.
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Lloyd Noel Ferguson (1918 –2011)
- An African American organic chemist who invented a moth repellent, a silverware cleanser, and a lemonade powder in his backyard laboratory as a child.
- Worked on chemo receptors and organic chemistry.
- Contributed strongly to the knowledge of taste in relation to structures chemical compounds.
- Knowledge contributions helped in summarizing the mechanisms for many chemical carcinogens and methods for the determination of structure-function relationships in anticancer agents.
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Samuel Proctor Massie, Jr. (1919 – 2005)
- An African American Organic chemist and the first black U.S Naval professor.
- Worked in the Manhattan project to develop the atomic bomb during the second world war. He researched on Uranium isotopes during this time.
- After the war, he worked on different chemicals which were geared towards the development of therapeutic drugs.
- Researched on the chemistry of phenothiazine, used to treat psychotic disorders.
- Recognised as one of the distinguished contributors to chemistry in history.
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Marie Maynard Daly (1921 –2003)
- A biochemist who was the first African American woman in the USA to earn a Ph.D. in chemistry.
- First to develop methods for the fractionation of nuclear material and determination of its composition. Important in the separation of cellular materials into its components, without destroying them.
- Discovered that atherosclerosis occurs as a result of hypertension and identified the link between cholesterol and clogged arteries. Lead to the understanding of what happens in a heart attack.
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Alma Levant Hayden (1927 – 1967)
- An African American chemist
- Known for exposing that the common substance in a very expensive controversial anti-cancer drug Krebiozen was Creatine. Creatine is known to have no impact on cancer cells in animals.
- She was an expert in spectrophotometry which is an application used to measure the absorbance, reflectance, and transmission of light by solids, liquids, and gases.
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Dolphus Edward Milligan (1928-1973)
- An African American chemist with expertise in spectroscopy.
- His research focused on using spectroscopy to study reaction intermediates at extremely low temperature.
- Dolphus' work on free radicals and the spectra of molecular ions research earned him many different awards.
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Professor Osamu Shimomura (1928-2018)
- A Japanese born organic chemist
- Survivor of the Nagasaki bombing during the second world war.
- He worked with Roger Yonchien Tsien and others in the discovery of the green glowing proteins, which can be used to mark proteins with fluorescence, allowing the presence of the particular protein to be seen.
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Tu Youyou (1930-)
- A pharmaceutical chemist born in Ningbo, Zhejiang province in China.
- She discovered the use of artemisinin and dihydroartemisinin in the treatment of malaria and won the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with two other people for this work.
- Her work has saved millions of lives all over the world.
- She is the first Chinese woman from to receive a Nobel Prize in any category.
- Her works have also fetched her many awards.
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Bertram Oliver Fraser-Reid (1934 – 2020)
- A Jamaican born synthetic organic chemist.
- Contributed immensely to the use of carbohydrates as starting materials for chiral materials.
- He also worked on exploring the roles oligosaccharides play in immune response.
- Fraser-Reid had a breakthrough in oligosaccharide synthesis by being able to develop a molecule which contains 28 monosaccharide units.
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Bettye Washington Greene (1935 – 1995)
- A Physical chemist in industrial research
- The first African American female Ph.D. chemist to work at Dow Chemical Company.
- Worked on polymers, latex and colloids chemistry, probing interactions between latex and paper.
- Received her first patent "Stable latexes containing phosphorus surface groups", describing a latex paper coating.
- Awarded a patent in 1990 for the invention of a latex based pressure sensitive adhesive for coating conventional substrates to form an adhesive tape.
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Professor Yuan T. Lee (1936 - )
- A Taiwanese born chemist.
- He used advanced chemical kinetics processes to evaluate and manipulate chemical reactions.
- He has also contributed a lot in the areas of chemical elementary processes, chemical reactivity and chemical kinetics and has received a lot of awards in this regard including the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1986.
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Professor Baldomero Oliver (1941-)
- A Filipino born chemist.
- Discovered the molecules conotoxins (very important molecules used in neuroscience) from the cone snail.
- Renowned for his works in the chemistry of snail and snake venoms. This discovery led to breakthrough in the study of neuromuscular synapses and ion channels.
- He made an invaluable contribution to the field of genetic engineering and recombinant DNA technology by being the first to characterize E. coli DNA ligase, an important enzyme in this field.
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Professor Roger Yonchien Tsien (1952-2016)
- He was born into a Chinese family.
- A biochemist and worked in collaboration with an organic chemist, Osamu Shimomura to discover green fluorescent protein (GFP). The pair received the Noble prize in Chemistry in 2008 for this discovery. This work has contributed generously to the advancements in fluorescence microscopy wildly used in cell biology.
- He was also well-known for his pioneering work in calcium imaging (used to track activity of neurons over time).
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Prasanna (AP) de Silva (1952-)
- A Sri Lanka born professor of organic chemistry at Queen’s University, Belfast, Northern Ireland.
- Invented the molecular logic gates (a molecule that performs an operation based on physical or chemical inputs).
- Construction of phosphorescent sensory systems
- Invented a molecule sensor to measure sodium levels.
