Education and Research
She developed a passion for chemistry from a young age, and her mother fostered her interest in science in general. Her state school education left her without Latin or a further science subject, but she took private tuition in order to enter the Oxford University entrance examination. At age 18 she started studying chemistry at Somerville College, Oxford, then one of the University of Oxford colleges for women only.
She studied for a PhD at the University of Cambridge under the supervision of John Desmond Bernal, where she became aware of the potential of X-ray crystallography to determine the structure of proteins, working with him on the technique's first application to analysis of a biological substance, pepsin.
In 1933 she was awarded a research felllowship by Somerville College, and in 1934, she moved back to Oxford. The college appointed her its first fellow and tutor in chemistry in 1936, a post which she held until 1977. In the 1940s, one of her students was Margaret Roberts, the future Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who installed a portrait of Hodgkin in Downing Street in the 1980s.
Together with Sydney Brenner, Jack Dunitz, Leslie Orgel, and Beryl M. Oughton, she was one of the first people in April 1953 to travel from Oxford to Cambridge see the model of the structure of DNA, constructed by Francis Crick and James Watson.
In 1960 she was appointed the Royal Society's Wolfson Research Professor, an honour that provided her salary, research expenses and research assistance to continue her work at Oxford.
Read more about this topic: Dorothy Hodgkin
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