Nobel Prize Winners at USC
The Nobel prize is a set of six international prize awards in the fields of chemistry, physics, literature, economics, physiology and medicine. They have been awarded annually since 1901 in honor of the will of Alfred Nobel – the inventor of the dynamite. The winner receives approximately 8 million Swedish Krona ($1 million USD) and an 18-karat gold medal. Over the years many University of Southern California professors have won the Nobel Prize. Let us take a look at what research led them to winning the Nobel Prize.
Source: USC News
The world around us is made up of atoms that are joined together to form molecules. During chemical reactions atoms change places and new molecules are formed. To accurately predict the course of the reactions at the sites where the reaction occurs advanced calculations based on quantum mechanics are required. For other parts of the molecules, it is possible to use the less complicated calculations of classical mechanics. In the 1970s, Martin Karplus, Michael Levitt, and Arieh Warshel successfully developed methods that combined quantum and classical mechanics to calculate the courses of chemical reactions using computers.
Source: “Arieh Warshel - Facts”. Nobelprize.org. Nobel Media AB 2014. Web.
2000: James Heckman (Economics)
- Presidential Scholar-in-Residence
Source: i1os
Contribution: Developed methods for handling selective samples in a statistically satisfactory way. He also showed how similar methods can be used to evaluate the effect of public labor market programs and educational programs, and to estimate the effect of length of unemployment on the probability of getting a job.
Source: Nobel Prize Organizataion
2000: Daniel McFadden (Economics)
- Presidential Professor of Health Economics
Source: The Brattle Group
Contribution: Showed how to statistically handle fundamental aspects of micro-data, namely data on the most important decisions we make in life: the choice of education, occupation, place of residence, marital status, number of children, so called discrete choices.Contribution: Showed how to statistically handle fundamental aspects of micro-data, namely data on the most important decisions we make in life: the choice of education, occupation, place of residence, marital status, number of children, so called discrete choices.
Source: Nobel Prize Organization
1994: George A. Olah (Chemistry)
- Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Distinguished Professor of Organic Chemistry
Source: USC Pressroom
Professor Olah’s research spans a wide range of synthetic and mechanistic organic chemistry. But most notably, his work on the chemistry of carbocations earned him the 1994 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Olah and his group have developed a wide variety of superacids which possess such low nucleophilicity toward carbocations that they can be prepared and directly observed as long lived species in these media. Higher valency Lewis acid fluorides such as SbF5, TaF5, combined with Brønsted acids such as HF or FSO3H results in superacids that are billions of times stronger than sulfuric acid.
Source:USC Dornsife
1969: Murray Gell-Mann (Physics)
- Presidential Professor of Physics and Medicine and Professor of Medicine and Physics and Astronomy
Source: USC News
The Nobel Prize in Physics 1969 was awarded to Murray Gell-Mann “for his contributions and discoveries concerning the classification of elementary particles and their interactions”.
Source: "The Nobel Prize in Physics 1969". Nobelprize.org. Nobel Media AB 2014. Web.
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