In 1884, Carlos Montezuma earned his B.S. in chemistry and became the first Native American to graduate from the University of Illinois. He went on to become one of the first Native Americans to earn a medical degree.

H.N. Cheng (PhD, '74, Gutowsky) is retired as a research chemist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service based in New Orleans, but continues to serve as a collaborator and conduct research. In 2021, he served as President of the American Chemical Society and is one of...

Since 1900, 26 alumni or faculty members from Chemistry at Illinois have served as president of The American Chemical Society (ACS), which was founded in 1876 and is one of the world’s largest scientific organizations.

Ruth Eliza Okey, first woman PhD graduate in the Department of Chemistry at Illinois In the early 1900s, Ruth Eliza Okey attended Monmouth College in Monmouth, Ohio, to major in chemistry, “because she liked it.” She also majored in German, because she was told “no woman could make a living as a chemist,” Okey recalled in an autobiographical essay that was published in the...

In 1916, St. Elmo Brady became the first African American in the United States to obtain a PhD in Chemistry at the University of Illinois, where he conducted research in Noyes Laboratory. Born on Dec. 22, 1884, in Louisville, Kentucky, Brady graduated from Louisville Colored High School in 1903 and went on to Fisk University, an all-black college in Nashville, Tennessee. There he was encouraged...