Robert Howson Pickard

Sir Robert Howson Pickard FRS (27 September 1874 – 18 October 1949) was a chemist who did pioneering work in stereochemistry and also for the cotton industry in Lancashire.

[2] He was born in Balsall Heath, Birmingham, Warwickshire, (now the West Midlands), England,[1] the son of Joseph Henry Pickard, a tool maker, and Alice his wife, the daughter of Robert Howson of Birmingham.

In 1896 he attended the University of Munich as an 1851 Exhibitioner[3] being awarded a PhD summa cum laude in 1898.

While at Blackburn was involved in publication of 35 papers in the Journal of the Chemical Society.

He did original work on chemical structure and optical isomerism and as a result became a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1917.