Gilbert Haight, professor emeritus of chemistry at the University of Illinois, died April 27, 2015, of natural causes. He was 92.
Born in 1922, Haight graduated from Stanford and earned a Ph.D. in chemistry from Princeton in 1946. During World War II, he worked on the Manhattan Project as part of his dissertation. After receiving his Ph.D., Haight was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford.
Subsequently, he held teaching positions in chemistry at the universities of Hawaii and Kansas, George Washington University, Swarthmore, Texas A & M, and lastly at the University of Illinois, where he taught from 1966 until he retired in 1989. During sabbaticals, he continued his research in Denmark, Australia, Malaysia, and San Diego, Calif.
Haight pioneered the blending of multimedia and television into lectures and labs for teaching chemistry. In 1979, he received the American Chemical Society’s George C. Pimental Award in Chemical Education. Haight’s chemistry textbooks have been widely used. His former Swarthmore student, David Baltimore, won the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1975.
Haight is survived by his wife, Shirley, whom he married in 1946; four children; seven grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.
Graduate memorials are prepared by the APGA.