Dr. Derek A. Davenport was born in Leicester, England, and received his early education there and in London, earning the B.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of London. Coming to the United States in 1950, he taught one year at Reed College and two years at Ohio State University before accepting a teaching position at Purdue University, where he is presently Professor of Chemistry. He is particularly interested in undergraduate and beginning graduate teaching. 

     Professor Davenport has been the recipient of a number of prestigious awards. In 1970 he won the Standard Oil Undergraduate Teaching Award, in 1973 he received the Visiting Scientist Award of the Western Connecticut Section of the American Chemical Society, and in 1974 the Manufacturing Chemists Association Award in Chemical Education.

     In 1962-63 he spent a year in India helping in the establishment of the Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur, now a flourishing institution. A visit to Nigeria followed in 1964. And from January 1970 to June 1971 he was again at the Indian Institute of Technology. In March 1976 Professor Davenport was a Visiting Scholar at the University Center in Virginia, and later that year he was chosen Lecturer-of-the-Year by the Indiana Academy of Science.

     Since 1966 he has served as a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Chemical Education. In 1979 he served as Chairman of the Division of Chemical Education of the American Chemical Society and also as Chairman of the Purdue University Section of the ACS. 

     Professor Davenport radiates his enthusiasm for the history of chemistry. He possesses great personal warmth and is an exciting lecturer. He enjoys a national reputation for his ability to bring to life through his dynamic lectures those scientist who were involved in the development of late eighteenth-century chemistry. Lavoisier, Priestley, Cooper, Thompson, Jefferson, Franklin, and Rush not only greatly influenced the emerging new science of chemistry, but each in his own way added something to the history and stature of the new American Republic.

     The story of Joseph Priestley, the subject of Dr. Davenport's lecture this evening, will introduce to us a scientist, teacher, theologian, historian, political activist, and essayist -- for Dr. Priestly was all of these. And it is indeed appropriate tonight, as we honor the memory and the achievements of Dr. Percy L. Julian, that we pause and remember that he too was not only a dedicated man of science, but also a seeker after truth in all its many facets of human endeavor and a staunch defender of political freedom for all men.

 

Derek Davenport, April 10, 1980

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