Lucy Weston Pickett

Lucy Weston Pickett (19 January 1904 to 23 November 1997) was an American chemist and the Mary Lyon Professor and Camille and Henry Dreyfus Chair in Chemistry at Mount Holyoke College, known for research on X-ray crystallography and on the ultraviolet absorption spectroscopy of organic molecules. Born in Beverly, Massachusetts, she entered Mount Holyoke in 1921, double majored in chemistry and mathematics, and took her Ph.D. at the University of Illinois in analytical chemistry with minors in physical chemistry and physics. She taught at Illinois and Goucher College before returning to Mount Holyoke in 1930, where she stayed until she retired in 1968. In 1932 and 1933 she worked with William Bragg at the Royal Institution in London, and in 1939 with Victor Henri at the University of Liege and with George Kistiakowsky at Harvard. She was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1955 and received the Garvan Medal of the American Chemical Society in 1957.