Professor Emeritus Gordon G. Hammes was born in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin in 1934. He received his BA from Princeton University in 1956, and his PhD from the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1959. After postdoctoral work with Manfred Eigen (1959-60) at the Max Planck Institut, he accepted an instructor position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1961 he was promoted to assistant professor, in 1964 associate and in 1965 full professor. In 1965 Professor Hammes left MIT to begin his career at Cornell University where he served as Chair from 1970-75 and was named Horace White Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry in 1975. From 1983-88 he served as director of the Cornell Biotechnolgy Program until he left the University in 1988 to become the Vice Chancellor of Academic Affairs at University of California at Santa Barbara and in 1991 he accepted a similar position at Duke University Medical Center.
During his time at Cornell, Professor Hammes was a National Science Foundation Senior Postdoctoral Fellow and a Fogarty Scholar-in-Residence at the National Institutes of Health. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He also received the American Chemical Society Award in Biological Chemistry.
He is currently the University
Distinguished Service Professor of Biochemistry at Duke University.
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