Gerhard Schmidt

Gerhard Schmidt was born in 1919 in Berlin

Schmidt was born in Berlin in 1919. His father and grandfather were both chemistry professors, and he attended high school in Munich. Because his mother was Jewish, he had to leave Germany at 16 after the Nazis took power, spending a year in Switzerland before moving to England.

He finished high school in England in 1938 and won a scholarship to Oriel College, Oxford. In July 1940 he was sent with about 200 other German emigrants to a detention camp in Australia, and he returned to England in August 1941. He earned a master's degree in organic chemistry under Robert Robinson in 1942 and a doctorate in crystallography under Dorothy Hodgkin in 1948.

In late 1948 he came to Israel and joined the Weizmann Institute, invited by Ernst Bergmann to set up a chemical crystallography group. He later headed the chemistry department, became the first dean of the chemistry faculty in 1970, and served as the institute's director. He also helped start German-Israeli scientific cooperation and founded the Israel Crystallography Society.

Outside the institute, he sat on the board of the Dead Sea Works from 1960 to 1968. He died in Zurich in July 1971 and was buried in Rehovot. The Weizmann Institute holds an annual memorial lecture in his name.