20th-century American chemists

Grant McDonald Wilson (May 24, 1931 – September 10, 2012) was a notable American thermodynamicist. He is widely known to the fields of chemical engineering and physical chemistry for having developed the Wilson equation, one of the first attempts of practical importance to model nonideal behavior in liquid mixtures as observed in practice with common polar compounds such as alcohols, amines, etc. The equation has been in use in all commercial chemical process simulators to predict phase behavior and produce safe process designs of commercial and environmental protection importance to the chemical industry. He founded the company Wilco (now Wiltec) in 1977 to research, measure, commercialize, and publish thermophysical property data for numerous chemical mixtures of interest to the industry. The Journal of Chemical & Engineering Data published a posthumous issue in honor of Wilson in April 2014 in recognition of his extensive contributions to the field.

Clair Cameron Patterson (June 2, 1922 – December 5, 1995) was an American geochemist. Born in Mitchellville, Iowa, Patterson graduated from Grinnell College. He later received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and spent his entire professional career at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).
In collaboration with George Tilton, Patterson developed the uranium–lead dating method into lead–lead dating. By using lead isotopic data from the Canyon Diablo meteorite, he calculated an age for the Earth of 4.55 billion years, which was a figure far more accurate than those that existed at the time, and one that has remained largely unchallenged since 1956.
Patterson first encountered lead contamination in the late 1940s as a graduate student at the University of Chicago. His work on this subject led to a total re-evaluation of the growth in industrial lead concentrations in the atmosphere and the human body, and his subsequent activism was seminal in the banning of tetraethyllead in gasoline and lead solder in food cans.

Carolyn L. Cannon-Alfred (born August 16, 1934 – August 29, 1987) was an American pharmacologist who established a medical clinic in South-central Los Angeles. She was an assistant professor of pharmacology at the Keck School of Medicine of USC and a senior pharmacologist at Riker Laboratories. Cannon-Alfred co-authored the Medical Handbook for the Layman in 1971.

Daniel J. Terra (June 8, 1911 – June 28, 1996) was a scientist, businessman, and art collector. A first-generation Italian-American, Terra earned a chemical engineering degree from Pennsylvania State University in 1931, and founded Lawter Chemicals in Chicago in 1940. The success of his global enterprise enabled him to pursue his cultural interests, assembling an art collection and participating in several Chicago arts institutions.

William Edward "Butch" Hanford (December 9, 1908 – January 27, 1996) was an American chemist who is best known for developing the modern process to make multipurpose material polyurethane. Hanford's most notable discovery occurred while working with fellow chemist Donald Fletcher Holmes at DuPont. On June 2, 1942, Hanford was awarded a patent for his process. Currently, this method is responsible for manufacturing many of the plastics that are used in medicine, the automotive industry, and consumer products. Hanford's later accomplishments included the development of the first liquid household detergent and a new kind of ammunition for Winchester-Western Company. For his work, Hanford was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1991. The New York Times has noted that Hanford's developments were "monumental."

Bernard Vonnegut (August 29, 1914 – April 25, 1997) was an American atmospheric scientist credited with discovering that silver iodide could be used effectively in cloud seeding to produce snow and rain. He was the older brother of American novelist Kurt Vonnegut.

Herbert Max Finlay Freundlich (28 January 1880 in Charlottenburg – 30 March 1941 in Minneapolis) was a German chemist.His father was of German Jewish descent, and his mother (née Finlay) was from Scotland. His younger brother was Erwin Finlay Freundlich (1885–1964).
He was a department head at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry (now the Fritz Haber Institute) from 1919 until 1933, when the racial policies of the Nazi party demanded the dismissal of non-Aryans from senior posts. In 1934 he became a foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.Emigrating to England, Freundlich accepted a guest professorship at University College London. Five years later, he accepted a professorship at the University of Minnesota. He died in Minneapolis two years later.
Freundlich's main works dealt with the coagulation and stability of colloidal solutions.
His most prominent student was Robert Havemann who became a well known colloid chemist of the German Democratic Republic.
His work is of continuing importance, with his 1907 paper "Über die Adsorption in Lösungen" (On adsorption in solutions) becoming highly cited at the beginning of the 21st century. This early paper was based on his habilitation thesis written in Leipzig under the guidance of Wilhelm Ostwald, and was heavily based on the work of Sten Lagergren.

Lorene Lane Rogers (April 3, 1914 – January 11, 2009) was an American biochemist and educator who served as the 21st President of the University of Texas at Austin. She has been described as the first woman in the United States to lead a major research university.

Dr. Clyde Allen Hutchison Jr. (May 5, 1913 – August 29, 2005) was an American chemist notable for his research in magnetic resonance spectroscopy.

Hutchison was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and
a chairman and professor of the department of chemistry at the University of Chicago.
He was also a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences,
a fellow of the American Physical Society,
a member of the American Chemical Society,Guggenheim fellow at Oxford University,
the George Eastman Professor at Oxford University,
and a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
He was also a recipient of the Peter Debye Award in Physical Chemistry from the American Chemical Society. He served as editor of the Journal of Chemical Physics from 1953 - 1955 and again from 1958 - 1959.
Hutchison participated in the Manhattan Project.
The University of Chicago said that Hutchison "pioneered research in magnetic resonance spectroscopy".

Alex Golden Oblad (November 26, 1909 – September 19, 2000) was a prominent chemist and chemical engineer principally recognized for his pioneering work in catalysis and catalytic chemistry.