Willard F. Libby

Willard F. Libby (December 17, 1908 – September 8, 1980) was an American chemist. In 1960 he was the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on developing radiocarbon dating. Libby was born in Grand Valley, Colorado. Between 1927 and 1933 he studied at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1941 he received a Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, but after America joined World War II Libby was transferred to the Manhattan Project which developed the atomic bomb. Having previously been an Associated and Assistant Professor, Libby accepted a position as Professorship of Chemistry at the University of Chicago in 1945. It was while he was Professor at Chicago that he developed radiocarbon dating.