CalTech Professor Wins National Medal of Science

President Obama recently named seven scholars as winners of the National Medal of Science. The recipients will be honored at a White House ceremony later in the year.

The awards, established in 1959, go to individuals who have made outstanding contributions to science. When announcing the winners, the President said, “Their ingenuity inspires us all to reach higher and try harder, no matter how difficult the challenges we face.”

One of the seven winners of the National Medal of Science is a woman.

Jacqueline K. Barton is the Arthur and Marian Hanisch Memorial Professor of Chemistry and Chair of the Division of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. She was honored for her discovery of a new property of the DNA helix.

Professor Barton is a summa cum laude graduate of Barnard College. She earned a Ph.D. in inorganic chemistry at Columbia University in 1978.  She was hired to the faculty at Columbia University in 1983 and became an associate professor of chemistry and biological sciences in 1985. She was promoted to full professor in 1986. In the fall of 1989, Dr. Barton joined the faculty at CalTech.