Nobel Prize Recipient. Willard Frank Libby, an American chemist, received international recognition after being awarded the 1960 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He was the first professor from the University of California at Los Angeles to be recognized with a Nobel Prize. Highly recognized in the scientific community, he received 34 nominations since 1953 for the Nobel candidacy. According to the Nobel Prize committee, he received the coveted award "for his method to use carbon-14 for age determination in archaeology, geology, geophysics, and other branches of science." In 1949 while doing research, he developed a method for applying a technique to determine the age of fossils and archeological relics. When a living organism dies, the supply of atmospheric carbon ceases, thus the content of carbon-14 declines through radioactive decay at a fixed rate. Radiocarbon dating has become the single most important advance in the field of archaeology. Born the oldest son of a farmer, Ora Edward Libby, his father's birth surname was Stockton, but was change to Libby as a child. Libby attended the University of California at Berkeley, where he received a bachelor's degree in 1931 and a doctorate degree in chemistry in 1933. After graduation, he joined the faculty at Berkeley, where he successively advanced from instructor in 1933 to assistant professor in 1938, to associate professor in 1945. In 1941 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship to work at Princeton University in New Jersey, but this was interrupted the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor with the United States entering World War II. At this point, he was sent to the Columbia War Research Division of Columbia University in New York City until the end of the war. He had the opportunity to work with 1934 Nobel Prize in Chemistry recipient, Harold Urey, while at Columbia University. He participated in developing a method for separating uranium isotopes by gaseous diffusion, an essential step in the creation of the atomic bomb. During this time, he developed a method for dating well water and wine, as well as for measuring circulation patterns of water and the mixing of ocean waters. After the war in 1945, he accepted a position of professor in the department of chemistry at the University of Chicago until 1959. During this period of his career, in March of 1947, he and his students first discovered carbon-14 could be used for age determination. From 1945 to 1952 he was a Member of the Committee of Senior Reviewers of the Atomic Energy Commission. United States President Dwight D. Eisenhower appointed him to the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, serving from 1955 to 1959, when he resigned with two years remaining on the appointment. Unlike many of the professional colleagues who were supporting a ban on nuclear weapons, he supported nuclear weapons as the nation faced the Cold War of the 1950s. From 1959 he was a professor of chemistry at the University of California at Los Angeles. In 1962 he became the director of the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics at UCLA, remaining at the post for the rest of his life. He was often a consultant for various industries, the defense department, scientific organizations and universities. Besides his 1941 Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, he received one in 1951 and then again from 1959 to 1962. He belonged to numerous professional organizations around the world. Besides the Nobel Prize, he received the Research Corporation Award for 1951 for the radiocarbon dating technique; the Chandler Medal of Columbia University for outstanding achievement in the field of chemistry in 1954; the American Chemical Society Award for Nuclear Applications in Chemistry in 1956; the Elliott Cresson Medal of the Franklin Institute in 1957; the American Chemical Society's Willard Gibbs Medal Award in 1958; the Albert Einstein Medal Award in 1959; and the Day Medal of the Geological Society of America in 1961. His book, "Radiocarbon Dating," was published with a second edition in 1955. He married twice. He and his first wife had twin daughters born in 1945. His second wife, Leona Woods Marshall, as a physicist, was often the only woman on projects as she successively worked with the Manhattan Project, at the University of Chicago, and then UCLA. A prolific author, his second wife published, "The Life Work of Nobel Laureate Willard Libby" in 1982. The December of 1960 edition of "Time" magazine listed him among the "Men of the Year" title. He died from the complications of pneumonia. A statement from one of his Nobel Prize nominations reads, "Seldom has a single discovery in chemistry had such an impact on the thinking in so many fields of human endeavor. Seldom has a single discovery generated such wide public interest."