History

The UC San Diego Division of Physical Sciences began when Roger Revelle, father of the university, recruited Harold Urey, winner of the 1934 Nobel Prize in Chemistry and professor at the University of Chicago, to teach chemistry at the School of Science and Engineering in 1958—the predecessor to UC San Diego. Urey’s presence attracted other key faculty members to the nascent campus, whose first building—Urey Hall—still stands today. Since our founding, Nobel laureates, like Urey and Maria Goeppert Mayer (the second woman in history to win the Nobel Prize in Physics), as well as members of the National Academy of Sciences, have led our Departments of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Mathematics and Physics—all playing a central role in UC San Diego’s national and international research and teaching prominence. (Pictured below, left to right: Roger Revelle, Maria Goeppert Mayer, Harold Urey, and Revelle and Urey at the 1964 Farewell to Revelle event. Photos courtesy of UC San Diego Library Digital Collections).