From 1942 to 1944, Barton was a government research chemist, then from 1944 to 1945 he worked for
Albright and Wilson in
Birmingham. He then became Assistant Lecturer in the Department of Chemistry of Imperial College, and from 1946 to 1949 he was
ICI Research Fellow. During 1949 and 1950, he was a visiting lecturer in natural products chemistry at
Harvard University, and was then appointed reader in organic chemistry and, in 1953, professor at
Birkbeck College. In 1955, he became
Regius Professor of Chemistry at the
University of Glasgow, and in 1957, he was appointed professor of organic chemistry at
Imperial College, London. In 1950, Barton showed that organic molecules could be assigned a preferred
conformation based upon results accumulated by chemical physicists, in particular by
Odd Hassel. Using this new technique of
conformational analysis, he later determined the geometry of many other natural product molecules. In 1969, Barton shared the
Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Odd Hassel for “contributions to the development of the concept of conformation and its application in chemistry." In 1958, Barton was appointed Arthur D. Little Visiting Professor of
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and in 1959 Karl Folkers Visiting Professor at the
Universities of Illinois and
Wisconsin. The same year, he was elected a foreign honorary member of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1949, he was the first recipient of the
Corday-Morgan Medal and Prize awarded by the
Royal Society of Chemistry. In 1954 he was elected a
Fellow of the Royal Society and the International Academy of Science, Munich as well as, in 1956, a Fellow of the
Royal Society of Edinburgh; in 1965 he was appointed member of the
Council for Scientific Policy. He was
knighted in 1972, becoming formally
styled Sir Derek in Britain. In 1978, he became Director of the
Institut de Chimie des Substances Naturelles (ICSN - Gif Sur-Yvette) in
France. In 1977, on the occasion of the centenary of the Royal Institute of Chemistry, the British Post Office honoured him, and 5 other Nobel Prize-winning British chemists, with a series of four postage stamps featuring aspects of their discoveries. He moved to the United States in 1986 (specifically
Texas) and became
distinguished professor at
Texas A&M University and held this position for 12 years until his death. In 1996, Barton published a comprehensive volume of his works, entitled
Reason and Imagination: Reflections on Research in Organic Chemistry. As well as for his work on conformation, his name is remembered in a number of reactions in organic chemistry, such as the
Barton reaction, the
Barton decarboxylation, and the
Barton-McCombie deoxygenation. The newly built Barton Science Centre at
Tonbridge School in
Kent, where he was educated for 4 years, completed in 2019, is named after him. == Honours and awards==