Winner of 1995 Nobel Prize in chemistry to speak at KU April 15 and 16

LAWRENCE -- One of the scientists who received a Nobel Prize for determining that chlorofluorocarbons - or CFCs - were harming the Earth's atmosphere, will deliver two lectures on smog and global warming on the KU campus in April.

F. Sherwood Rowland, a former University of Kansas chemistry professor and recipient of the 1995 Nobel Prize in chemistry, will deliver the Department of Chemistry Werner Lecture, a technical/scientific lecture, at 3:30 p.m. Monday, April 15, in 110 Budig Hall at KU. He will speak on "Global Smog: Cities and Biomass Burning."

On Tuesday, April 16, Rowland will present "The Greenhouse Effect and Global Warming," a general lecture sponsored by the Department of Chemistry and the KU Center for Research. This lecture will take place at 3:30 p.m. in Woodruff Auditorium in the Kansas Union.

Both lectures are free and open to the public.

Rowland was born in the small central Ohio town of Delaware, where his father was a professor of mathematics and chair of the mathematics department at Ohio Wesleyan University. Rowland completed his undergraduate work at Ohio Wesleyan and obtained his Ph.D. in chemistry at the University of Chicago.

In 1956, Rowland accepted an assistant professorship at the University of Kansas. He taught at KU until 1964.

In the 1970s, as a distinguished chemist specializing in radioactive processes at the University of California, Irvine, Rowland happened upon another scientist's observation: Aerosol propellants didn't vanish into the air, the scientist had previously noted, but rather accumulated in the stratosphere 6 to 30 miles above Earth.

The propellants, known as CFCs, were believed to be harmless, or inert, but Rowland questioned that belief. He and a fellow UC-Irvine chemist, Mario Molina, pursued the question. What they discovered earned them and Paul Crutzen of the Netherlands -- upon whose earlier research they built -- a Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1995.

The full text of Rowland's autobiography, a photo and the press release from the Nobel Committee are available online at www.nobel.se/chemistry/laureates/1995/rowland-autobio.html.