Donald Crothers Biography, Age, Height, Wife, Net Worth and Family

Professor Crothers was well known for insights into the structure and physical properties of nucleic acids. He won the Alexander von Humboldt Senior Scientist Award (1981), was named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1986), and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences (1987). He was awarded the Emily M. Gray Award of the Biophysical Society (2008) for “significant contributions to education through creating rigorous, groundbreaking texts enriching generations of biophysicists,” an award which he shared with David Eisenberg of the University of California, Los Angeles. The two co-authored the 1979 text “Physical Chemistry with Applications to the Life Sciences,” which has become a standard textbook in the field.

As a Yale undergraduate, Crothers worked with Ignacio Tinoco, then a postdoctoral associate, in the laboratory of John Kirkwood. Along with Victor Bloomfield, Crothers and Tinoco later co-authored two books, including the 1974 text Physical Chemistry of Nucleic Acids,” updated in 2000 as “Nucleic Acids: Structures, Properties, and Functions.”

After a postdoctoral fellowship with Manfred Eigen at the Max-Planck-Institut in Göttingen, Germany, he returned to Yale University as a faculty member in the Department of Chemistry in 1964. Professor Crothers was named to an associate professorship in 1968, to a full professorship in 1971, and to the Alfred E. Kemp Professorship in Chemistry in 1985. He served four three-year terms as Chairman of the Yale Department of Chemistry (1975-1981; 1994-2000). At the time of his retirement in 2003, he was Sterling Professor of Chemistry and held a joint appointment in the Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry, of which he was a founding member.

Donald Crothers was the son of the late Morris King Crothers and Florence Kittredge Crothers. He graduated summa cum laude from Yale University in 1958 with a B.S. in Chemistry and earned a B.A. from the University of Cambridge in 1960. His study of Chemistry at Clare College, Cambridge was supported by a Mellon Fellowship. He received his Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of California, San Diego, in 1963, working with Bruno Zimm.

Donald Crothers (January 28, 1937 – March 16, 2014) was a professor of chemistry at Yale University in the United States. He was best known for his work on nucleic acid structure and function.