University of Michigan-Ann Arbor

plutonium chloride from plutonium oxide mixtures. Other alumni include nuclear physicist Robert Bacher, a leader of the Manhattan Project; Richard Smalley, who discovered fullerenes; Moses Gomberg, a pioneer in radical chemistry, who later became a professor at the university and taught Frank Spedding, who led the development of the Ames process in the Manhattan Project.
Alumni in biology and medicine include Marshall Warren Nirenberg, famous for breaking the genetic code, who received his Ph.D. in biochemistry from the university in 1957; Stanley Cohen, who discovered growth factors; and John Jacob Abel, regarded as the father of pharmacology, who studied under the university's physiologist Henry Sewall in 1883. Other alumni include Raymond Pearl, a founder of biogerontology, David Botstein, a leader of the Human Genome Project, and Nancy Ascher, the first woman to perform a liver transplant.
Other notable alumni in science include Edgar F. Codd, who developed the relational model of data and completed his Ph.D. …