Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin
Aimee Hartnell
The Science
Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin was the first British woman to win a Nobel Prize for Chemistry for her pioneering work in crystallography, which enabled her to map the structures of penicillin, insulin and vitamin B12. I have tremendous admiration for her brilliance, generosity of spirit, and tireless hard work - particularly in the face of the disability and pain inflicted on her by rheumatoid arthritis at a young age - so when my school’s Chemistry lab was named after her, I wanted to create a portrait of her to help our pupils relate to the scientist behind the name. This pencil drawing is an interpretation of a photograph of her in 1937: I hope she would have approved of the use of graphite, with its beautifully regular hexagonal crystal structure, as a medium.
The Artist
Aimee Hartnell teaches Chemistry at Rye St Antony School in Oxford and loves painting and poetry as much as the Periodic Table. She has written a collection of chemical song parodies (which you can find on her website Musical Chemistry) and posts occasional creations, plus her attempts to foist the beauty of science onto her two children, on Instagram as @amine_h.art.nyl.
Copyright statement. This work is published under the CC BY-NC-SA license