1960 Seaborg Award: Charles D. Coryell

Coryell earned a Ph.D. at California Institute of Technology in 1935 as the student of Arthur A. Noyes. During the late 1930s he engaged in research on the structure of hemoglobin in association with Linus Pauling. He also taught at UCLA before 1942. In 1942 he accepted a job with the Manhattan Project, for which he was Chief of the Fission Products Section, both at the University of Chicago (1942–1946) and at Clinton Laboratories (now Oak Ridge National Laboratory) in Oak Ridge, Tennessee (1943–1946). His group had responsibility for characterizing radioactive isotopes created by the fission of uranium and for developing a process for chemical separation of plutonium.

In 1945 he was a member of the Clinton Laboratories team, with Jacob Marinsky and Lawrence E. Glendenin, that isolated the previously undocumented rare-earth element 61 (promethium).

At MIT he conducted research in fission fine-structure and beta decay theory until his death in 1971.

The Charles D. Coryell Award of the Division of Nuclear Chemistry and Technology of the American Chemical Society, which is awarded annually to undergraduate students doing research projects in nuclear-related areas, is named in his honor.

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