Willard Libby

Willard Frank Libby was an American chemist and university teacher born in Grand Valley in 1908. He worked at the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Chicago, and the University of California, Los Angeles. Libby was educated at the University of California, Berkeley, and Princeton University, where he studied under doctoral advisor Wendell Mitchell Latimer. His field of work was physical chemistry, and he participated in the Manhattan Project.

Libby received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Arthur L. Day Medal, and the Elliott Cresson Medal. He was a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Sciences. He was married to Leona Woods and had doctoral students F. Sherwood Rowland and Maurice Sanford Fox. Libby died in Los Angeles in 1980.