Hunt, John Meacham.

John M. Hunt is a chemist. He received the Treibs Award for organic geochemistry in 1982. He authored over 100 publications on petroleum and geochemistry.

John Meacham Hunt was born on 1 December 1918 in Cleveland, Ohio. He came to Penn State in 1941 to pursue graduate studies, and worked as an assistant in the petroleum refining lab. His duties included analyzing gasoline from worldwide refineries for toluene to make TNT, and developing aviation lubricants and hydraulic fluids and liquid-liquid extraction columns for hydrocarbon purification. After he completed his doctorate, he served as an instructor in chemistry at Penn State and worked under contract with Esso Research to develop a process to polymerize propylene with sulfuric acid. He was offered a postdoctoral appointment to study motor fuel synthesis in 1947 by Standard Oil of New Jersey, but decided instead to take a night course in geology at Tulsa University and in 1948 was named a research chemist, initiating geochemical research at the Jersey Production Research Company in Tulsa, where he worked from 1948 to 1963. He joined the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in 1964, where he served as a department chair (1964-1974) and conducted research in chemical oceanography and marine geochemistry. He received the Karcher Medal in 1979, and in 1982 became the first American to receive the Treibs Medal of the Geochemical Society. He was awarded the Gold Medal of Honor of the Albert Einstein from the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences in 2002. He served as vice chair of the National Academy of Sciences Workshop on Inputs, Fates and Effects of Petroleum in the Marine Environment, as well as serving on numerous other national committees. He retired in 1984 as a Scientist Emeritus. John Meacham Hunt died on 23 July 2005 at the age of eighty-six.