From Notable Alumni · Foundation editorial

Co-founder and later president of the National Academy of Sciences; Harvard chemistry professor. Oliver Wolcott Gibbs (CC 1841) is the kind of nineteenth-century American scientist who produces, on inspection, an embarrassingly long curriculum vitae: a Columbia degree at nineteen, training in Berlin and Paris under most of the chemists worth training under, the first electrogravimetric analyses of copper and nickel, founding membership in the National Academy of Sciences (1863) and its presidency thirty years later. He spent his last working decades in the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard, which was lucky to have him.