Franklin Sherwood Rowland Biography - Nobel Prize Winner (1995)

Franklin Sherwood Rowland (born June 28, 1927) is a Nobel laureate and a professor of chemistry at the University of California, Irvine. His research is in atmospheric chemistry and chemical kinetics.

Born in Delaware, Ohio, Rowland received his B.A. from Ohio Wesleyan University in 1948. He then earned his M.S. in 1951 and his Ph.D. in 1952, both from the University of Chicago. He held academic posts at Princeton University (1952-56) and at the University of Kansas (1956-64) before becoming a professor of chemistry at the University of California, Irvine, in 1964. At Irvine in the early 1970s he began working with Mario Molina. Rowland was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1978, and served as a president of American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 1993.

His best-known work is the discovery that chlorofluorocarbons contribute to ozone depletion. He received the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry along with Mario Molina of MIT and Paul Crutzen of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany. The Physical Sciences Building at the University of California, Irvine, which held his laboratories for many years, was renamed Rowland Hall in his honor that same year.