* Astronomy

Harold Clayton Urey was born in the small town of Walkerton, Indiana, on April 29, 1893. He taught school in Indiana and Montana, then earned bachelors degrees in biology and chemistry from the University of Montana. After a stint at a chemical plant in Philadelphia, he earned a PhD in chemistry at the University of California at Berkeley in 1923. Following a fellowship in theoretical physics at the Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, he joined the Chemistry faculty at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, then moved to Columbia University in New York. On Thanksgiving Day in 1931, Urey discovered the hydrogen isotope deuterium, a feat that earned him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1934.
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