He was the son of the renowned chemist William A. Noyes; they became the first father-son pair to win the Priestley Medal, the highest honor given by the American Chemical Society.
[1] Noyes enrolled at Grinnell College in 1914, but enlisted in the military in 1917, after the United States entered World War I.
He then decided to enroll at the University of Paris (Sorbonne), where he studied in the lab of Henry Le Chatelier and earned his Ph.D. in chemistry in 1920.
[3] Noyes began his scientific and academic career at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was a teaching fellow under Joel Henry Hildebrand.
During this period, he collaborated with Philip Leighton of Stanford University to write an influential textbook, The Photochemistry of Gases, which appeared in 1941.
After the United States entered the war, Noyes was named head of the Chemical Warfare and Smoke Division of the newly formed Office of Scientific Research and Development.
[14] In 1963, Noyes joined the faculty of the University of Texas at Austin, where he continued to teach and conduct research until his retirement in 1973.