Gershom (Jan M.L.) Martin The Lady Thatcher Professorial Chair in Chemistry Dept. of Organic Chemistry | Faculty of Chemistry | Weizmann Institute of Science | Rehovot | Israel

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The Baroness Thatcher Professorial Chair of Chemistry

The Margaret Thatcher Chair of Chemistry was endowed in 1985 by the Weizmann Institute Foundation of the United Kingdom, and named in honor of then British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. (A few chairs endowed by national Weizmann committees were named after incumbent heads of government, notably the Lester B. Pearson Chair of Protein Research by the Canadian Society for WIS.)

Mrs. Thatcher (who since has been created Baroness Thatcher) not only is thus far the only British PM to have a degree in the sciences, but hers was actually in chemistry, and she carried out some crystallographic research under the guidance of Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin before moving into a very different field of human endeavor.

Fittingly, the longtime first incumbent of the Thatcher Chair was a crystallographer himself, Prof. Meir Lahav. When Prof. Lahav retired, the chair devolved on the closest thing to a recently tenured crystallographer they could find, namely me :-)

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