Shoemaker, David P.

David Powell Shoemaker (1920-1995) was born in Kooskia, Idaho on 12 May 1920, received a from Reed College in 1942 and his Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology in 1947, both in chemistry. In 1947 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship which he spent at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen. He returned to Caltech as a senior research fellow (1948-1951) before going to MIT as an assistant professor. He moved to Corvallis in 1970 as chairman of the Chemistry Department at Oregon State University and retired in 1984. During his time as chairman (1970-1981) he had primary responsibility for the construction of the Gilbert Hall Addition, a teaching facility.

Shoemaker's primary research was in x-ray crystallography. He and his wife, Clara, determined the structures of complex transition-metal phases, research begun with the determination of the structure of the sigma phase at Pauling’s laboratory at Caltech.

...