George B. Chapman ’50 *53

George died Sept. 7, 2016, in Washington, D.C.

After graduating from high school in 1943, he served in the Navy in the Pacific theater during World War II. He was a member of Campus, majored in biology, and graduated with high honors. He then earned a master’s degree in 1952 and a Ph.D. in 1953, both from Princeton. While pursuing his doctoral thesis in conjunction with RCA Laboratories, which was developing electron microscopes, he became the first to see the structure of the inside of a bacterium.

Prior to his 1963 appointment as chairman of biology at Georgetown, he was on the faculty of Harvard and Cornell Medical School.

For 27 years as chairman, he spent countless hours personally guiding thousands of undergraduates in teaching labs that focused on cell structure. He was a two-time recipient of Georgetown’s Bunn Award for teaching. He published more than 100 articles on cells from a diverse range of species, and was a fellow in the American Society for Microbiology.

He worked in his laboratory into his 91st year, submitting a manuscript and his most extraordinary electron micrographs for a long-planned book.

While academia consumed most of his time, he did enjoy getting away to fish. George never married and leaves no close relatives.