Chemists

Leonhard Grill

Leonhard Grill is an Austrian physical chemist and professor at the University of Graz who studies single molecules on surfaces and won the first Nanocar Race in 2017.

Leonor Michaelis

Leonor Michaelis (1875–1949) was a German-born biochemist and physician who, with Maud Menten, derived the Michaelis–Menten constant in 1913 and later worked at the Rockefeller Institute.

Leopold Horner (1911–2005) was a German organic chemist and professor at the University of Mainz, namesake of the Horner–Wadsworth–Emmons olefination, a widely used reaction for forming carbon–carbon double bonds.

Leopold Ruzicka

Leopold Ruzicka (Leopold Ružička, 1887–1976) was a Croatian-born Swiss chemist at ETH Zurich who won the 1939 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for work on terpenes and synthesized testosterone.

Leslie Leiserowitz

Leslie Leiserowitz, born 1934 in Johannesburg, is an Israeli chemist and crystallographer at the Weizmann Institute whose work showed how molecular chirality controls crystal shape and nucleation.

Lester Andrews

Lester Andrews, born 1942, is an American physical chemist and emeritus professor at the University of Virginia known for matrix-isolation infrared spectroscopy and the first compounds bonding uranium to noble gases.

Letian Dou

Letian Dou is a materials chemist and chemical engineer known for hybrid organic-inorganic perovskites (OSiPs), Paul & Phyllis Fireman Professor of Chemistry at Emory University since 2025 after Purdue.

Leticia González (theoretical chemist)

Leticia González, born 1971 in Madrid, is a Spanish theoretical chemist and professor at the University of Vienna, best known for developing the SHARC surface-hopping method for photochemistry.

Lewis G. Longsworth

Lewis G. Longsworth was an American chemist and biochemist who spent his entire career, 1928 to 1970, at the Rockefeller Institute in New York, known for electrophoresis and diffusion measurements.

Lewis Hastings Sarett

Lewis Hastings Sarett was an American organic chemist at Merck & Co. who achieved the first synthesis of cortisone in 1944, during World War II.

Lewis J. Fetters

Lewis J. Fetters (1936–2023) was an American polymer chemist, professor at the University of Akron from 1967 to 1983 and then a Senior Research Associate at Exxon Research and Engineering.

Lifeng Chi

Lifeng Chi (迟力峰, born 1957) is a Chinese surface physical chemist known for on-surface chemical reactions and molecular self-assembly, a Chinese Academy of Sciences academician elected in 2021.

Liming Dai

Liming Dai is a materials scientist and Scientia Professor at UNSW Sydney known for carbon-based metal-free electrocatalysts, opened by his 2009 Science paper on nitrogen-doped carbon nanotubes beating platinum.

Liming Zhang

Liming Zhang (张立明) is an organic chemist known for his work in homogeneous gold catalysis, including Au(I)/Au(III) redox catalysis, and a professor at UC Santa Barbara.

Lin X. Chen

Lin X. Chen is a chemist at Northwestern University and Argonne National Laboratory known for time-resolved X-ray studies of the structures molecules take after absorbing light.

Lingjun Li

Lingjun Li (李灵军) is an analytical chemist and professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison known for discovering more than 500 novel neuropeptides and for TEMI, a single-cell-resolution mass spectrometry imaging method.

Sep 17, 2026

Linus Pauling

Linus Carl Pauling (1901–1994) was an American chemist who helped establish quantum chemistry and molecular biology, winning the 1954 Chemistry and 1962 Peace Nobel Prizes.

Lior Elbaz

Lior Elbaz is an Israeli electrochemist and full professor at Bar-Ilan University whose research on precious-metal-free fuel-cell catalysts led him to found the Israeli Fuel Cells Consortium in 2016.

Liviu M. Mirica

Liviu M. Mirica is an American inorganic and organometallic chemist who has been the Lycan Professor of Chemistry at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign since 2019, known for nickel and palladium catalysis.

Loh Teck Peng

Loh Teck Peng (罗德平), often published as Teck-Peng Loh, is a Malaysia-born organic chemist and Distinguished University Professor at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, known for green chemistry.

Loren David Walensky

Loren David Walensky is a chemical biologist and pediatric oncologist, Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and Dana-Farber researcher, known for hydrocarbon-stapled peptides and BAX activation studies.

Lorenz S. Cederbaum

Lorenz S. Cederbaum is a German theoretical chemist, born in 1946, who has spent his career at Heidelberg University and is known for the MCTDH method and interatomic Coulombic decay.

Louis B. Werner

Louis B. Werner was an American chemist who co-isolated the first weighable amount of plutonium in 1942 at the Metallurgical Laboratory in Chicago, and the first pure compound of curium-242 in 1947.

Louis Camille Maillard

Louis Camille Maillard (1878–1936) was a French physician and chemist who described in 1912 the browning reaction between amino acids and reducing sugars that bears his name.

Louis E. Brus

Louis E. Brus, also known as Louis Brus, was an American physical chemist at Columbia University who shared the 2023 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for discovering quantum dots.

Louis Fieser

Louis Fieser (1899–1977) was an American organic chemist at Harvard who synthesized vitamin K1 in 1939, led the wartime team that developed napalm, and co-wrote the Reagents for Organic Synthesis series with his wife Mary.

Sep 17, 2026

Louis Pasteur

Louis Pasteur (1822–1895) was a French chemist and microbiologist who established germ theory, molecular chirality, and attenuated vaccination, and developed the heat treatment called pasteurization.

Louis Plack Hammett

Louis Plack Hammett (1894–1987) was an American physical organic chemist at Columbia University, known for the Hammett equation and the acidity function for measuring superacids.

Lucio Frydman

Lucio Frydman is an NMR and MRI spectroscopist, professor at the Weizmann Institute in Israel, known for MQMAS solid-state NMR and ultrafast single-scan multidimensional NMR.