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【简介】 The Department of Chemistry is housed in Hamilton Hall, a modern 220,000 sq. ft teaching and research facility. The Chemistry Department at the University of Nebraska was founded in 1882. Hudson H. Nicholson was hired as its Chair and only member. Nicholson was very adept at developing programs for the University, hiring the best personnel to staff the department, attracting the best students into the graduate program, and choosing succinct projects for the students to research.
Rachel A. Lloyd was hired as the department’s second chemistry professor in 1887. She was a woman of many firsts. She was the first woman to publish a research article in Organic Chemistry (actually she published the first three research articles). She was the first woman to earn a Ph.D. in Chemistry (University of Zurich, 1886), and she was also the first woman in the world to become a chemistry professor—at the University of Nebraska.
George Bell Frankforter earned the first master’s degree west of the Mississippi in 1888. Actually, our Chemistry program was the first graduate program of any kind west of the Mississippi. Frankforter was hired by the Chemistry Department at The University of Minnesota and shortly thereafter became its Chair.
Rosa Bouton was the department’s second graduate student to earn her master’s degree, in 1893. She was the first woman to receive a graduate degree west of the Mississippi. After graduation, Bouton was hired as the fourth faculty member in the department. Her interests in training women in the scientific method led her to found the School of Domestic Science, which ultimately became the College of Human Resources and Family Sciences.
The first two women members of the American Chemical Society were Rachel Lloyd in 1891 and Rosa Bouton in 1893. The Nebraska local section was founded in 1895 as the seventh local section of the Society (and the first one located west of the Mississippi). For three decades, the Nebraska local section had more women members than any other section. During those decades, half of the faculty and one fourth of the graduate students were women.
Horace Grove Deming was a faculty member who specialized in chemical education. His textbook titled “General Chemistry” was the top-selling chemistry text from the 1920’s until the late 1940’s. It was translated into several languages. He also wrote two books that popularized chemistry and one of them remained in print until the 1980’s. He retired early to Hawaii long before that though. Interestingly, history repeated itself through the 1970’s and 1980’s when another faculty member, Henry Holtzclaw Jr., co-authored a text titled “General Chemistry with Qualitative Analysis”.
It was also the top-selling chemistry textbook of its day. Clifford S. Hamilton was the department’s first research star. Hamilton was a faculty member during the late 1920’s through the 1960’s and trained over 120 graduate students. He studied organic arsenic compounds and later antimalarials. One of the drugs he created was Arsphenamine which was sold by Parke, Davis & Co. as Marpharsen. Until very recently, this arsencial provided the best cure for syphilis. His antimalarial drug Camoquin also sold well.
One of the most famous graduate students is Donald J. Cram. He shared the Nobel Prize in 1987 with two others for their creative approaches to organic synthesis. Cram earned his degree at Nebraska working as Norman Cromwell’s first graduate student. Cromwell got it right the first time.
Professors Cromwell, Hamilton, Militzer, Baumgarten, and Washburn were all top researchers who were most active during the 1940’s and 1950’s. They created the attitudes toward research that exist in the department today.
The Department grew to its current size when the nine-story Hamilton Hall of Chemistry was completed in 1970. In the mid-1980’s, the Science Citation Index did a study in which they found that the publications from UNL Chemistry faculty had an impact factor (number of citations divided by number of publications) that placed it among the top 30 in the world.
