Chemistry has a long history at Oxford. The early pioneer of chemistry
Robert Boyle and his assistant
Robert Hooke began working in Oxford in the mid-seventeenth century. A chemistry laboratory was built in the basement of the
Old Ashmolean Building in 1683, which was used until 1860. Chemical research was also conducted in laboratories set up in individual colleges –
Christ Church, Oxford (1767),
Magdalen College, Oxford (Daubeny Laboratory, 1848),
Balliol College, Oxford (1853, later joined with
Trinity College, Oxford to become the
Balliol-Trinity Laboratories),
Queen's College, Oxford (1900), and
Jesus College, Oxford (1907). Chemistry was first recognized as a separate discipline at Oxford with the building of a laboratory attached to the
Oxford University Museum of Natural History, opening in 1860. The laboratory is a small octagonal structure to the right of the museum, built in stone in the
Victorian Gothic style. The design was based on the
Abbot's Kitchen at
Glastonbury and it adopted the
same name despite being a laboratory. The building was one of the first ever purpose-built chemical laboratories anywhere and was extended in 1878. The
Abbot's Kitchen in Oxford was expanded considerably in 1957 to become the main Inorganic Chemistry Laboratory (ICL). The
Dyson Perrins Laboratory opened in 1916 and was the centre of the Department of Organic Chemistry until 2003 when it was replaced by the
Chemistry Research Laboratory. The Physical Chemistry Laboratory replaced the
Balliol-Trinity Laboratories in 1941, and its east wing completed in 1959. The physical and theoretical chemistry departments merged in 1994 and the
Physical and Theoretical Chemistry Laboratory became its base in 1995. A number of professors and scientists who worked in the department had won the
Nobel Prize; they include
Frederick Soddy for his work on
radioactivity with
Ernest Rutherford,
Cyril Norman Hinshelwood for his work on
chemical kinetics, and
Dorothy Hodgkin on
crystallography. Among the notable achievements by professors in the department are the development of the
Periodic Table by
William Odling, work on solid state chemistry by
John Stuart Anderson and
John B. Goodenough (winner of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry), and
bioinorganic chemistry by
Robert Williams. ==Notable staff and alumni==