John D. Roberts

John Dombrowski Roberts (June 8, 1918 to October 29, 2016) was an American chemist born in Los Angeles who taught at Pennsylvania State University, UCLA, Harvard, MIT, and Caltech over a long career. A student of William Gould Young, he worked to connect physical chemistry, spectroscopy, and organic chemistry so that chemists could better understand how and why reactions proceed at the rates they do. He was among the first chemists to apply nuclear magnetic resonance and the concept of spin coupling to determining the structures of organic molecules, helping turn NMR into a standard tool of the field.