20th Century

Born: Cairo (Egypt), 1910
Died: Warwickshire (England), 1994

Hodgkin studied at the Somerville College, Oxford. She was fascinated by the complex organic structures. As Bernal's assistant she became a crystallographer and obtained her Ph.D. in Cambridge (1937). She worked on the determination of different important compounds: pepsin, sterols, insulin, penicillin and vitamin B12. Hodgkin's work was unique not just for its technical brilliance or its medical importance, but because, at every step she used computing machines of various degrees of sophistication. It was for the work on penicillin and vitamin B12 that she won the Nobel Prize in 1964.