John V. Atanasoff Research and Discovery Award
Awarded to an alumni of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences who has furthered scientific knowledge of the nation and the world, either through laboratory accomplishments and/or management. Award established in 2005.

Darleane Hoffman
BS 1948
Chemistry
PhD 1951
Chemistry (Nuclear)
Oakland, California


Ames. Oak Ridge. Los Alamos. Lawrence Berkeley. Lawrence Livermore. There's hardly a U.S. Department of Energy National Lab where Darleane (Christian) Hoffman hasn't worked and been highly successful.  She is an internationally recognized expert in the study of actinides and the still heavier elements, dubbed transactinides (TANS). Typically, TANS decay to lighter elements or fission almost immediately making studies of their chemical properties extremely challenging.  She has also applied her expertise in nuclear and radiochemistry to the problems of nuclide migration in the environment at the Nevada Test Site, research that ultimately led to the development of the Yucca Mountain Project, an underground repository for nuclear waste.

Currently a professor of the Department of Chemistry’s Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley, Hoffman also continues as a faculty senior scientist in the Nuclear Science Division at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. She worked with Nobel laureate Glenn Seaborg and was a co-founder and Charter Director of the Seaborg Institute for Transactinium Science at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory from 1991-1996.

Hoffman has received numerous awards during her career including the 1997 National Medal of Science, the prestigious Priestly Medal in 2000 of the American Chemical Society (ACS) and was the first woman (1983) to be awarded the ACS Award for Nuclear Chemistry. She was the first woman leader of a scientific division at Los Alamos (1979-84). In 1984 she left to become the second tenured woman professor in the Chemistry Department at UC Berkeley. She is a past recipient of the ISUAA’s Distinguished Alumni Award (1978) and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences’ Citation of Merit (1986).

Darleane Hoffman

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