Lloyd Noel Ferguson
*Lloyd Noel Ferguson was born on this date in 1918. He was a Black chemist, author, and educator.
Ferguson was the son of Noel Ferguson, a businessman, and Gwendolyn Ferguson, a housemaid from Oakland, CA. Ferguson’s interest in chemistry began when he was a child. He built a shed in his backyard to conduct experiments away from his house, where he developed a moth-repellent silverware cleanser and lemonade powder. Ferguson skipped two grades, and although an illness kept him out of school for a year, he graduated from Oakland Tech High School in 1934 when he was sixteen.
After high school, Ferguson worked as a porter for the Works Progress Administration and the Southern Pacific Railway Company to save money for college. In 1936, Ferguson became the first in his family to attend college, and he earned his B.S. degree with honors in chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1940. Ferguson then earned his PhD. He earned a degree in chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1943, making him the first Black to do so.
After receiving his PhD., he took a faculty position at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College. Approximately two years later, he moved to Howard University, where he became the chair of his department and founded a doctoral program. He was the first in chemistry at any black college. While affiliated with Howard University, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1953 and an NSF grant in 1960, allowing him to travel to the Carlsberg Laboratory in Copenhagen, Denmark, and ETH Zurich in Switzerland. He moved to California State University, Los Angeles, in 1965. He again became chair and played an advisory role to the Food and Drug Administration; he retired in 1986.
Ferguson is the author of seven chemistry textbooks and more than 50 research papers. His research included work on organic chemistry, the relation between structure and function in biochemistry, chemotherapy treatments for cancer, and the chemical basis for the human sense of taste. In 1972, Ferguson was one of the founders of the National Organization for the Professional Advancement of Black Chemists and Chemical Engineers.
In his honor, the organization gives its Lloyd N. Ferguson Young Scientist Award to young scientists with "technical excellence and documented contributions to their field." He received the Outstanding Professor Award from the California State University system in 1979–1980. In 1995, the chemistry department at Cal. State L.A. established the annual Lloyd Ferguson Distinguished Lecture series in Ferguson's honor.
Lloyd Noel Ferguson died on November 30, 2011.
