Roscoe Gilkey Dickinson Earns the First PhD

Roscoe Gilkey Dickinson became the first student to earn a PhD at Caltech when he received a doctorate in chemistry in 1920. After completing his undergraduate education at MIT, Dickinson began working with Arthur Amos Noyes, the founder and first director of the Gates Chemical Laboratory, on X-ray crystallography, a then-pioneering technique to help determine the atomic configurations of crystals; Caltech was the first academic institution in the United States to conduct X-ray crystallography research. Dickinson joined the Caltech faculty as a professor of chemistry, mentoring promising graduate students including Linus Pauling (PhD '25), who went on to become a two-time Nobel laureate.