List of Nobel laureates in Chemistry facts for kids

Alfred Nobel, who created the Nobel Prizes.

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry is a super important award given every year to scientists who make amazing discoveries in chemistry. It's one of five prizes created by Alfred Nobel, a Swedish chemist, in his will back in 1895. He wanted to celebrate people who made the world a better place. The other prizes are for physics, literature, peace, and medicine.

The Nobel Foundation manages the prize, and the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences decides who wins. The very first Nobel Prize in Chemistry was given in 1901 to Jacobus Henricus van 't Hoff from the Netherlands. Winners get a special medal, a fancy diploma, and money. In 1901, van 't Hoff received a lot of money, which would be worth millions today! The awards are given out in Stockholm, Sweden, on December 10th, which is the day Alfred Nobel passed away.

Interesting Facts About Chemistry Nobel Winners

Many Nobel Prizes in Chemistry have been given for work in organic chemistry, which is the study of carbon-based compounds. This is more than any other area of chemistry!

Two German scientists, Richard Kuhn (1938) and Adolf Butenandt (1939), were not allowed by their government to accept their prizes. They later received the medal and diploma, but not the money.

Frederick Sanger is one of only three people to win the Nobel Prize twice in the same subject (chemistry), in 1958 and 1980. Other people have won Nobel Prizes in different subjects, like Maria Skłodowska-Curie (physics in 1903, chemistry in 1911) and Linus Pauling (chemistry in 1954, peace in 1962). As of 2022, 189 people have won the Chemistry Nobel Prize, and eight of them have been women. Maria Skłodowska-Curie was the first woman to win it in 1911.

When the Prize Wasn't Awarded

There have been eight years when the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was not given out. These were 1916, 1917, 1919, 1924, 1933, and 1940–1942. Sometimes, the prize was delayed and given out the following year. For example, the 1914 prize was given in 1915 to Theodore William Richards. This happened several times, including for the 1918 prize (given in 1919 to Fritz Haber) and the 1944 prize (given in 1945 to Otto Hahn).

Recent Trends in Chemistry Prizes

A study in 2020 showed that many science Nobel Prizes between 1995 and 2017 went to just a few specific areas. In chemistry, molecular chemistry was the main field that won prizes. Molecular chemists won about 5.3% of all science Nobel Prizes during this time.

Nobel Laureates in Chemistry

Year	Image	Laureate	Country	Reason for Winning	Ref
1901		Jacobus Henricus van 't Hoff (1852–1911)	Netherlands	"for his discovery of the rules of chemical dynamics (how fast reactions happen) and osmotic pressure in solutions"
1902		Hermann Emil Fischer (1852–1919)	Germany	"for his work on making sugar and purine compounds"
1903		Svante August Arrhenius (1859–1927)	Sweden	"for his theory about how electrolytes break apart in water"
1904		Sir William Ramsay (1852–1916)	United Kingdom	"for finding the inert gases in the air and figuring out where they fit on the periodic table"
1905		Adolf von Baeyer (1835–1917)	Germany	"for helping organic chemistry and the chemical industry with his work on dyes and hydroaromatic compounds"
1906		Henri Moissan (1852–1907)	France	"for studying and isolating the element fluorine, and for the electric furnace named after him"
1907		Eduard Buchner (1860–1917)	Germany	"for his research in biochemistry and finding fermentation without living cells"
1908		Ernest Rutherford (1871–1937)	United Kingdom  New Zealand	"for his studies on how elements break down and the chemistry of radioactive substances"
1909		Wilhelm Ostwald (1853–1932)	Germany	"for his work on catalysis and his research into the basic rules of chemical balance and reaction speeds"
1910		Otto Wallach (1847–1931)	Germany	"for his help in organic chemistry and the chemical industry with his early work on alicyclic compounds"
1911		Marie Curie, née Skłodowska (1867–1934)	Poland ( Russian Empire)  France	"for finding the elements radium and polonium, by isolating radium and studying this amazing element"
1912		Victor Grignard (1871–1935)	France	"for finding the Grignard reagent"
		Paul Sabatier (1854–1941)	France	"for his way of adding hydrogen to organic compounds using tiny metal particles"
1913		Alfred Werner (1866–1919)	Switzerland	"for his work on how atoms link up in molecules, especially in inorganic chemistry"
1914		Theodore William Richards (1868–1928)	United States	"for accurately figuring out the atomic weight of many chemical elements"
1915		Richard Martin Willstätter (1872–1942)	Germany	"for his research on plant colors, especially chlorophyll"
1916	zzzNot awarded
1917
1918		Fritz Haber (1868–1934)	Germany	"for making ammonia from its basic elements"
1919	zzzNot awarded
1920		Walther Hermann Nernst (1864–1941)	Germany	"for his work in thermochemistry (the study of heat in chemical reactions)"
1921		Frederick Soddy (1877–1956)	United Kingdom	"for his work on the chemistry of radioactive substances and his studies on where isotopes come from"
1922		Francis William Aston (1877–1945)	United Kingdom	"for finding isotopes in many non-radioactive elements using his mass spectrograph, and for his whole-number rule"
1923		Fritz Pregl (1869–1930)	Austria  Kingdom of Yugoslavia	"for inventing a way to do micro-analysis of organic substances"
1924	zzzNot awarded
1925		Richard Adolf Zsigmondy (1865–1929)	Germany  Hungary	"for showing that colloid solutions are not uniform and for his methods"
1926		The (Theodor) Svedberg (1884–1971)	Sweden	"for his work on disperse systems (mixtures where one substance is spread throughout another)"
1927		Heinrich Otto Wieland (1877–1957)	Germany	"for his studies on the structure of bile acids and similar substances"
1928		Adolf Otto Reinhold Windaus (1876–1959)	Germany	"for his research into the structure of sterols and how they relate to vitamins"
1929		Arthur Harden (1865–1940)	United Kingdom	"for their studies on how sugar ferments and on fermentative enzymes"
		Hans Karl August Simon von Euler-Chelpin (1873–1964)	Sweden  Germany
1930		Hans Fischer (1881–1945)	Germany	"for his research into the structure of haemin and chlorophyll and especially for making haemin"
1931		Carl Bosch (1874–1940)	Germany	"for their work in inventing and developing chemical high pressure methods"
		Friedrich Bergius (1884–1949)	Germany
1932		Irving Langmuir (1881–1957)	United States	"for his discoveries and studies in surface chemistry"
1933	zzzNot awarded
1934		Harold Clayton Urey (1893–1981)	United States	"for finding heavy hydrogen"
1935		Frédéric Joliot (1900–1958)	France	"for their creation of new radioactive elements"
		Irène Joliot-Curie (1897–1956)	France
1936		Peter Debye (1884–1966)	Netherlands	"for his work on molecular structure through his studies on dipole moments and how X-rays and electrons scatter in gases"
1937		Walter Norman Haworth (1883–1950)	United Kingdom	"for his studies on carbohydrates and vitamin C"
		Paul Karrer (1889–1971)	Switzerland	"for his studies on carotenoids, flavins and vitamins A and B2"
1938		Richard Kuhn (1900–1967)	Germany	"for his work on carotenoids and vitamins"
1939		Adolf Friedrich Johann Butenandt (1903–1995)	Germany	"for his work on sex hormones"
		Leopold Ružička (1887–1976)	Kingdom of Yugoslavia  Switzerland	"for his work on polymethylenes and larger terpenes"
1940	zzzNot awarded
1941
1942
1943		George de Hevesy (1885–1966)	Hungary	"for his work using isotopes as tracers to study chemical processes"
1944		Otto Hahn (1879–1968)	Germany	"for finding the fission of heavy atomic nuclei"
1945		Artturi Ilmari Virtanen (1895–1973)	Finland	"for his research and inventions in farming and food chemistry, especially his fodder preservation method"
1946		James Batcheller Sumner (1887–1955)	United States	"for finding that enzymes can be crystallized"
		John Howard Northrop (1891–1987)	United States	"for preparing enzymes and virus proteins in a pure form"
		Wendell Meredith Stanley (1904–1971)	United States
1947		Sir Robert Robinson (1886–1975)	United Kingdom	"for his studies on plant products important in biology, especially alkaloids"
1948		Arne Wilhelm Kaurin Tiselius (1902–1971)	Sweden	"for his research on electrophoresis and adsorption analysis, especially for finding the complex nature of serum proteins"
1949		William Francis Giauque (1895–1982)	United States	"for his contributions in chemical thermodynamics, especially how substances behave at very low temperatures"
1950		Otto Paul Hermann Diels (1876–1954)	West Germany	"for finding and developing the diene synthesis"
		Kurt Alder (1902–1958)	West Germany
1951		Edwin Mattison McMillan (1907–1991)	United States	"for their discoveries in the chemistry of transuranium elements (elements heavier than uranium)"
		Glenn Theodore Seaborg (1912–1999)	United States
1952		Archer John Porter Martin (1910–2002)	United Kingdom	"for inventing partition chromatography (a way to separate mixtures)"
		Richard Laurence Millington Synge (1914–1994)	United Kingdom
1953		Hermann Staudinger (1881–1965)	West Germany	"for his discoveries in the field of macromolecular chemistry (the study of very large molecules)"
1954		Linus Pauling (1901–1994)	United States	"for his research into the nature of chemical bonds and how it helps understand complex substances"
1955		Vincent du Vigneaud (1901–1978)	United States	"for his work on important sulfur compounds in biochemistry, especially for making a polypeptide hormone for the first time"
1956		Sir Cyril Norman Hinshelwood (1897–1967)	United Kingdom	"for their research into the mechanism of chemical reactions"
		Nikolay Nikolaevich Semenov (1896–1986)	Soviet Union
1957		Lord (Alexander R.) Todd (1907–1997)	United Kingdom	"for his work on nucleotides and nucleotide co-enzymes"
1958		Frederick Sanger (1918–2013)	United Kingdom	"for his work on the structure of proteins, especially insulin"
1959		Jaroslav Heyrovský (1890–1967)	Czechoslovakia	"for finding and developing polarographic methods of analysis"
1960		Willard Frank Libby (1908–1980)	United States	"for his method using carbon-14 to figure out the age of things in archaeology, geology, and other sciences"
1961		Melvin Calvin (1911–1997)	United States	"for his research on how plants take in carbon dioxide"
1962		Max Ferdinand Perutz (1914–2002)	United Kingdom	"for their studies on the structures of globular proteins"
		John Cowdery Kendrew (1917–1997)	United Kingdom
1963		Karl Ziegler (1898–1973)	West Germany	"for their discoveries in the chemistry and technology of high polymers"
		Giulio Natta (1903–1979)	Italy
1964		Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin (1910–1994)	United Kingdom	"for her determinations using X-ray techniques of the structures of important biochemical substances"
1965		Robert Burns Woodward (1917–1979)	United States	"for his amazing achievements in creating organic substances"
1966		Robert S. Mulliken (1896–1986)	United States	"for his basic work on chemical bonds and the electron structure of molecules using the molecular orbital method"
1967		Manfred Eigen (1927–2019)	West Germany	"for their studies of extremely fast chemical reactions, done by quickly changing the balance with short energy pulses"
		Ronald George Wreyford Norrish (1897–1978)	United Kingdom
		George Porter (1920–2002)	United Kingdom
1968		Lars Onsager (1903–1976)	United States  Norway	"for finding the reciprocal relations named after him, which are key for understanding the thermodynamics of processes that don't stay in balance"
1969		Derek H. R. Barton (1918–1998)	United Kingdom	"for their help in developing the idea of conformation and how it's used in chemistry"
		Odd Hassel (1897–1981)	Norway
1970		Luis F. Leloir (1906–1987)	Argentina	"for finding sugar nucleotides and their role in making carbohydrates in living things"
1971		Gerhard Herzberg (1904–1999)	Canada  West Germany	"for his help in understanding the electron structure and shape of molecules, especially free radicals"
1972		Christian B. Anfinsen (1916–1995)	United States	"for his work on ribonuclease, especially how the amino acid order relates to its active shape"
		Stanford Moore (1913–1982)	United States	"for helping us understand the link between chemical structure and how the active part of the ribonuclease molecule works"
		William H. Stein (1911–1980)	United States
1973		Ernst Otto Fischer (1918–2007)	West Germany	"for their groundbreaking, independent work on the chemistry of organometallic compounds, also called sandwich compounds"
		Geoffrey Wilkinson (1921–1996)	United Kingdom
1974		Paul J. Flory (1910–1985)	United States	"for his basic work, both in theory and experiments, on the physical chemistry of macromolecules (very large molecules)"
1975		John Warcup Cornforth (1917–2013)	Australia  United Kingdom	"for his work on the stereochemistry (3D arrangement of atoms) of enzyme-catalyzed reactions"
		Vladimir Prelog (1906–1998)	Yugoslavia  Switzerland	"for his research into the stereochemistry of organic molecules and reactions"
1976		William N. Lipscomb (1919–2011)	United States	"for his studies on the structure of boranes, which helped explain chemical bonding"
1977		Ilya Prigogine (1917–2003)	Belgium	"for his work on non-equilibrium thermodynamics, especially the theory of dissipative structures"
1978		Peter D. Mitchell (1920–1992)	United Kingdom	"for helping us understand how biological energy is transferred through his chemiosmotic theory"
1979		Herbert C. Brown (1912–2004)	United States	"for developing the use of boron- and phosphorus-containing compounds as important tools in making organic substances"
		Georg Wittig (1897–1987)	West Germany
1980		Paul Berg (1926–2023)	United States	"for his basic studies of the biochemistry of nucleic acids, especially recombinant-DNA"
		Walter Gilbert (b. 1932)	United States	"for their contributions to figuring out the order of bases in nucleic acids"
		Frederick Sanger (1918–2013)	United Kingdom
1981		Kenichi Fukui (1918–1998)	Japan	"for their theories, developed separately, about how chemical reactions happen"
		Roald Hoffmann (b. 1937)	United States  Poland
1982		Aaron Klug (1926–2018)	United Kingdom	"for developing crystallographic electron microscopy and figuring out the structure of important biological nucleic acid-protein complexes"
1983		Henry Taube (1915–2005)	United States	"for his work on how electrons transfer in chemical reactions, especially in metal complexes"
1984		Robert Bruce Merrifield (1921–2006)	United States	"for developing a way to make chemicals using chemical synthesis on a solid surface"
1985		Herbert A. Hauptman (1917–2011)	United States	"for their amazing work in developing direct methods to figure out crystal structures"
		Jerome Karle (1918–2013)	United States
1986		Dudley R. Herschbach (b. 1932)	United States	"for their contributions to understanding the dynamics of basic chemical processes"
		Yuan T. Lee (b. 1936)	United States  Republic of China
		John C. Polanyi (b. 1929)	Canada  Hungary
1987		Donald J. Cram (1919–2001)	United States	"for developing and using molecules that have specific interactions with high selectivity"
		Jean-Marie Lehn (b. 1939)	France
		Charles J. Pedersen (1904–1989)	United States
1988		Johann Deisenhofer (b. 1943)	West Germany	"for figuring out the 3D structure of a photosynthetic reaction centre"
		Robert Huber (b. 1937)	West Germany
		Hartmut Michel (b. 1948)	West Germany
1989		Sidney Altman (1939–2022)	Canada  United States	"for finding the catalytic properties of RNA"
		Thomas Cech (b. 1947)	United States
1990		Elias James Corey (b. 1928)	United States	"for developing the theory and methods of organic synthesis"
1991		Richard R. Ernst (1933–2021)	Switzerland	"for his help in developing high resolution nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy methods"
1992		Rudolph A. Marcus (b. 1923)	United States  Canada	"for his contributions to the theory of electron transfer reactions in chemical systems"
1993		Kary B. Mullis (1944–2019)	United States	"for his help in developing methods in DNA-based chemistry, especially for inventing the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) method"
		Michael Smith (1932–2000)	Canada	"for his help in developing methods in DNA-based chemistry, especially for his basic work on site-directed mutagenesis using oligonucleotides and its use in protein studies"
1994		George A. Olah (1927–2017)	United States  Hungary	"for his work on carbocation chemistry"
1995		Paul J. Crutzen (1933–2021)	Netherlands	"for their work in atmospheric chemistry, especially about how ozone forms and breaks down"
		Mario J. Molina (1943–2020)	Mexico
		Frank Sherwood Rowland (1927–2012)	United States
1996		Robert F. Curl Jr. (1933–2022)	United States	"for finding fullerenes"
		Sir Harold W. Kroto (1939–2016)	United Kingdom
		Richard E. Smalley (1943–2005)	United States
1997		Paul D. Boyer (1918–2018)	United States	"for explaining the enzyme mechanism that makes adenosine triphosphate (ATP)"
		John E. Walker (b. 1941)	United Kingdom
		Jens C. Skou (1918–2018)	Denmark	"for first finding an enzyme that moves ions, called Na+, K+ -ATPase"
1998		Walter Kohn (1923–2016)	United States	"for developing the density-functional theory"
		John A. Pople (1925–2004)	United Kingdom	"for developing computer methods in quantum chemistry"
1999		Ahmed Zewail (1946–2016)	United States  Egypt	"for his studies of how chemical reactions change using femtosecond spectroscopy"
2000		Alan J. Heeger (b. 1936)	United States	"for finding and developing conductive polymers (plastics that can conduct electricity)"
		Alan G. MacDiarmid (1927–2007)	United States  New Zealand
		Hideki Shirakawa (b. 1936)	Japan
2001		William S. Knowles (1917–2012)	United States	"for their work on chirally catalysed hydrogenation reactions"
		Ryōji Noyori (b. 1938)	Japan
		K. Barry Sharpless (b. 1941)	United States	"for his work on chirally catalysed oxidation reactions"
2002		John B. Fenn (1917–2010)	United States	"for developing ways to identify and analyze the structure of biological macromolecules, especially their methods for soft desorption and ionisation for mass spectrometry"
		Koichi Tanaka (b. 1959)	Japan
		Kurt Wüthrich (b. 1938)	Switzerland	"for developing nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy to figure out the 3D structure of biological macromolecules in solution"
2003		Peter Agre (b. 1949)	United States	"for discoveries about channels in cell membranes, specifically for finding water channels"
		Roderick MacKinnon (b. 1956)	United States	"for discoveries about channels in cell membranes, specifically for studying the structure and how ion channels work"
2004		Aaron Ciechanover (b. 1947)	Israel	"for finding ubiquitin-mediated protein degradation (how cells break down proteins)"
		Avram Hershko (b. 1937)	Israel
		Irwin Rose (1926–2015)	United States
2005		Yves Chauvin (1930–2015)	France	"for developing the metathesis method in organic synthesis"
		Robert H. Grubbs (1942–2021)	United States
		Richard R. Schrock (b. 1945)	United States
2006		Roger D. Kornberg (b. 1947)	United States	"for his studies on how eukaryotic transcription works at a molecular level"
2007		Gerhard Ertl (b. 1936)	Germany	"for his studies of chemical processes on solid surfaces"
2008		Osamu Shimomura (1928–2018)	Japan	"for finding and developing the green fluorescent protein, GFP"
		Martin Chalfie (b. 1947)	United States
		Roger Y. Tsien (1952–2016)	United States
2009		Venkatraman Ramakrishnan (b. 1952)	United States  India  United Kingdom	"for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome"
		Thomas A. Steitz (1940–2018)	United States
		Ada E. Yonath (b. 1939)	Israel
2010		Richard F. Heck (1931–2015)	United States	"for palladium-catalyzed cross couplings in organic synthesis"
		Ei-ichi Negishi (1935–2021)	Japan
		Akira Suzuki (b. 1930)	Japan
2011		Dan Shechtman (b. 1941)	Israel  United States	"for finding quasicrystals"
2012		Robert Lefkowitz (b. 1943)	United States	"for studies of G-protein-coupled receptors"
		Brian Kobilka (b. 1955)	United States
2013		Martin Karplus (b. 1930)	United States  Austria	"for developing multiscale models for complex chemical systems"
		Michael Levitt (b. 1947)	United States  United Kingdom  Israel
		Arieh Warshel (b. 1940)	United States  Israel
2014		Eric Betzig (b. 1960)	United States	"for developing super-resolved fluorescence microscopy"
		Stefan W. Hell (b. 1962)	Germany  Romania
		William E. Moerner (b. 1953)	United States
2015		Tomas Lindahl (b. 1938)	Sweden  United Kingdom	"for studies on how DNA repair works"
		Paul L. Modrich (b. 1946)	United States
		Aziz Sancar (b. 1946)	United States  Turkey
2016		Jean-Pierre Sauvage (b. 1944)	France	"for designing and making molecular machines"
		Fraser Stoddart (b. 1942)	United Kingdom  United States
		Ben Feringa (b. 1951)	Netherlands
2017		Jacques Dubochet (b. 1942)	Switzerland	"for developing cryo-electron microscopy to figure out the high-resolution structure of biomolecules in solution"
		Joachim Frank (b. 1940)	Germany  United States
		Richard Henderson (b. 1945)	United Kingdom
2018		Frances Arnold (b. 1956)	United States	"for the directed evolution of enzymes"
		George Smith (b. 1941)	United States	"for the phage display of peptides and antibodies"
		Sir Gregory Winter (b. 1951)	United Kingdom
2019		John B. Goodenough (1922–2023)	United States	"for developing lithium ion batteries"
		M. Stanley Whittingham (b. 1941)	United Kingdom  United States
		Akira Yoshino (b. 1948)	Japan
2020		Emmanuelle Charpentier (b. 1968)	France	"for developing a method for genome editing"
		Jennifer Doudna (b. 1964)	United States
2021		Benjamin List (b. 1968)	Germany	"for developing asymmetric organocatalysis"
		David W.C. MacMillan (b. 1968)	United Kingdom  United States
2022		Carolyn Bertozzi (b. 1966)	United States	"for developing click chemistry and bioorthogonal chemistry"
		Morten Meldal (b. 1954)	Denmark
		K. Barry Sharpless (b. 1941)	United States
2023		Moungi G. Bawendi (b. 1961)	United States  France  Tunisia	"for finding and making quantum dots"
		Louis E. Brus (b. 1943)	United States
		Alexey Ekimov (b. 1945)	Russia

See also

In Spanish: Anexo:Ganadores del Premio Nobel de Química para niños

• Timeline of chemistry