Dorothy Hodgkin
1910–1994 · Chemist, X-ray crystallographer
Somerville chemist, Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1964 — the only British woman scientist to win a Nobel. Solved the structures of penicillin, vitamin B12, and insulin.
Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin came up to Somerville College in 1928 and graduated with a first-class honours degree in chemistry in 1932. Her career then unfolded almost entirely in Oxford, where she advanced the technique of X-ray crystallography to the point where it could resolve the three-dimensional structure of large biological molecules — work that opened the door to modern structural biology.
Her three landmark structures are penicillin (in the wartime years), vitamin B12 (which won her the 1964 Nobel Prize in Chemistry — she remains the only British woman scientist to have won a Nobel), and insulin, finally completed in 1969 after thirty-five years of work. Hodgkin died in Warwickshire in 1994.
Sources: Wikipedia: Dorothy Hodgkin
Last verified: Sat May 02 2026 01:00:00 GMT+0100 (British Summer Time)