University of California, Berkeley

Harold Clayton Urey was an American physical chemist whose pioneering work on isotopes earned him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1934. He played a... significant role in the development of the atom bomb, but may be most prominent for his contribution to theories on the development of organic life from non-living matter. Urey was born in Walkerton, Indiana to Reverend Samuel Clayton Urey and Cora Rebecca Reinoehl. After briefly teaching in rural schools, Urey earned a degree in zoology from the University of Montana and a Ph.D. in chemistry, studying thermodynamics under Gilbert N. Lewis at the University of California at Berkeley. At Berkeley, Urey was influenced by the work of physicist Raymond T. Birge and soon joined Niels Bohr in Copenhagen to work on atomic structure at the Institute for Theoretical Physics. On his return to the U.S. and between 1924 and 1928, he taught at The Johns Hopkins University as 'Associate in Chemistry', and then at Columbia where he assembled a team of associates that included Rudolph Schoenheimer, David Rittenberg and T. I. Taylor.
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Douglass Cecil North is an American economist known for his work in economic history. He is the co-recipient of the 1993 Nobel Memorial Prize in... Economic Sciences. In the words of the Nobel Committee, North and Fogel were awarded the prize "for having renewed research in economic history by applying economic theory and quantitative methods in order to explain economic and institutional change." Douglass North was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on November 5, 1920. He moved several times as a child due to his father's work at MetLife, living in Cambridge, Ottawa, Lausanne, New York City and Wallingford. North was educated at Ashbury College in Ottawa, Ontario and The Choate School in Wallingford, Connecticut. He was accepted at Harvard at the same time that his father became the head of MetLife on the west coast, so North opted to go to University of California, Berkeley. In 1942, he graduated with a B.A. in General Curriculum-Humanities. Although his grades amounted to slightly better than a "C" average, he managed to complete a triple major in political science, philosophy and economics.
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Henry Taube, Ph.D, M.Sc, B.Sc, FRSC was a Canadian-born American chemist noted for having been awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for "his... work in the mechanisms of electron-transfer reactions, especially in metal complexes." He was the first Canadian-born chemist to win the Nobel Prize. Taube completed his undergraduate and Masters degrees at the University of Saskatchewan, and his Ph.D from the University of California, Berkeley. After finishing graduate school, Taube worked at Cornell University, the University of Chicago and Stanford University. In addition to the Nobel Prize, Taube also received many other major scientific awards, including the Priestley Medal in 1985 and two Guggenheim Fellowships early in his career , as well as numerous honorary doctorates. His research focused on redox reactions, transition metals and the use of isotopically labeled compounds to follow reactions. He had over 600 publications including one book, and had mentored over 200 students during his career. Taube and his wife Mary had three children, his son Karl is an anthropologist at the University of California Riverside.
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Willis Eugene Lamb, Jr. was an American physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1955 together with Polykarp Kusch "for his discoveries... concerning the fine structure of the hydrogen spectrum". Lamb and Kusch were able to precisely determine certain electromagnetic properties of the electron . Lamb was a professor at the University of Arizona College of Optical Sciences. Lamb was born in Los Angeles, California, United States and attended Los Angeles High School. First admitted in 1930, he received a Bachelor of Science in Chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley in 1934. For theoretical work on scattering of neutrons by a crystal, guided by J. Robert Oppenheimer, he received the Ph.D. in physics in 1938. Because of limited computational methods available at the time, this research narrowly missed revealing the Mössbauer Effect, 19 years before its recognition by Mössbauer. Lamb was the Wykeham Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford from 1956 to 1962, and also taught at Yale, Columbia, Stanford and the University of Arizona. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1963.
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