He was a professor of chemistry and biochemistry from University of California, San Diego, and a leading polymer chemist and DNA researcher.
[6] After obtaining his Ph.D. in physical chemistry under the tutelage of Joe Mayer at Columbia University in 1944, he moved across town for postdoctoral work with Herman Mark at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, where he began his research on light scattering.
[5] In 1946 he took a position at UC Berkeley, where he continued the work on light scattering and invented the famous Zimm plot for determining both size (molecular weight) and shape factors for large molecules.
After a brief stint as a visiting professor at Yale in 1960, he moved to the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), where he remained for the rest of his life.
[5]In 1956, Zimm extended the Rouse model of Polymer Physics to include hydrodynamic interactions mediated by the solvent between different parts of the chain.