John Gamble Kirkwood

He attended Caltech for two years before transferring to the University of Chicago, where he was awarded his Bachelor of Science in 1926.

There, with Frederick G. Keyes, he mentored Herbert H. Uhlig, who subsequently became a noted physical chemist, specializing in the study of corrosion.

Kirkwood won the 1936 Langmuir Award in recognition of his status as the best young chemist in the United States.

During World War II, J. Robert Openheimer recruited Kirkwood to work as one of the scientists participating in the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb.

Every other year, the department of chemistry at Yale, together with the New Haven Chemical Society, awards the Kirkwood Medal.

[3] The year 1946 was especially notable for the appearance of the first paper in a long series that Kirkwood and his collaborators devoted to the fundamental statistical mechanical theory of transport processes.