An update on our most recent news story. Congratulations are now due to both Vijay Kanuru, who won the prestigious Lowry Prize in the Department of Chemistry in Michaelmas Term, and Rachel Pike, who has won it in Lent Term. The prize is awarded for the best graduate seminar in physical chemistry.
The prize is named after Thomas Martin Lowry, an English physical chemist born in 1874 near Bradford, West Yorkshire. In 1913 he became the first Professor of Chemistry in any London medical school – Guy’s Hospital Medical School. In 1920 he became the first holder of a chair of Physical Chemistry at Cambridge University, where he remained for the rest of his life. He studied changes in optical rotation caused by acid- and base-catalyzed reactions of camphor derivatives, which led to his formulation of the protonic definition of acids and bases in 1923, independently of the advocacy of the same concept by Johannes Nicolaus Brønsted in the same year.