the Noyes Professor of Chemistry from 1947 until he accepted an offer from Yale in 1952 to be the Sterling Professor at Yale and head its chemistry department. He headed the chemistry department at Yale until his death from colon cancer in 1959, at age 52. Every other year, the Department of Chemistry at Yale, together with the New Haven Chemical Society, awards the Kirkwood Medal. It is noteworthy that nearly half of the recipients of the Kirkwood Medal have gone on to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Kirkwood has two chairs in chemistry in his name. Yale has a John G. Kirkwood professorship in Chemistry. Caltech has a Kirkwood-Noyes professorship. In his classic 1939 paper “The Dielectric Polarization of Polar Liquids,” Kirkwood introduced for the first time the concept of orientational correlations for neighboring molecules and showed how these control the dielectric behavior of liquids. The year 1946 was especially notable for the appearance of the first paper in a long series that Kirkwood and his collaborators devoted to the fundamental statistical mechanical theory of transport processes. Kirkwood was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1942. See also Kirkwood approximation Kirkwood–Buff solution theory BBGKY hierarchy Hydrodynamic radius Notes References External links Biography of Kirkwood National Academy of Sciences Biographical Memoir 1907 births 1959 deaths People from Kiowa County, Oklahoma California Institute of Technology alumni University of Chicago alumni American physical chemists Cornell University faculty University of Chicago faculty California Institute of Technology faculty Yale University faculty Yale Sterling Professors Burials at Grove Street Cemetery Fellows of the American Physical Society