death_date nationality birth_date residence alma_mater death_place image_size spouse doctoral_students prizes image name caption birth_place field known_for doctoral_advisor notable_students article_title birth_name
29 july 1994 british 12 may 1910 england university of oxford ilmington , warwickshire , england 225px thomas lionel hodgkin judith howard tom blundell royal -lrb- 1964 -rrb- copley medal -lrb- 1976 -rrb- lomonosov gold medal medal -lrb- 1982 -rrb- -lrb- 1956 -rrb- nobel prize in chemistry dorothy hodgkin nobel.jpg dorothy mary crowfoot dorothy hodgkin cairo , egypt biochemistry , x-ray crystallography development of protein crystallography determining the structure of insulin john desmond bernal margaret thatcher dorothy hodgkin
 dorothy mary crowfoot
dorothy hodgkin

dorothy mary hodgkin , om , frs -lrb- 12 may 1910 -- 29 july 1994 -rrb- , known professionally as dorothy crowfoot hodgkin or simply dorothy hodgkin , was a british biochemist who developed protein crystallography , for which she won the nobel prize in chemistry in 1964 .
she advanced the technique of x-ray crystallography , a method used to determine the three-dimensional structures of biomolecules .
among her most influential discoveries are the confirmation of the structure of penicillin that ernst boris chain and edward abraham had previously surmised , and then the structure of vitamin b12 , for which she became the third woman to win the nobel prize in chemistry .
in 1969 , after 35 years of work and five years after winning the nobel prize , hodgkin was able to decipher the structure of insulin .
x-ray crystallography became a widely used tool and was critical in later determining the structures of many biological molecules where knowledge of structure is critical to an understanding of function .
she is regarded as one of the pioneer scientists in the field of x-ray crystallography studies of biomolecules .
