Robert H. Burris Photograph Collection

2025-01-31T16:04:14-05:00

This collection, a portion of which is digitized here, consists of slides of chemists and biochemists from the Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA held in 1975, as well as photographs of Robert Burris' colleagues, primarily dating from the 1960s and 1970s, assembled over the course of his career. 35mm color transparencies from the 1975 Asilomar Conference have been digitized.

Robert H. Burris earned his B.S. in Chemistry from South Dakota State University in 1936 and studied under Perry W. Wilson at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he earned his Ph.D. in Bacteriology in 1940. Burris subsequently undertook a year of postdoctoral research in Physical Chemistry at Columbia University, working under Harold Urey, before returning to the University of Wisconsin. As a professor of Biochemistry, Burris continued to research biological nitrogen fixation using mass spectrometry and worked with students on biological N2 fixation, photosynthesis, and respiratory enzymes. Burris was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society and was awarded the National Medal of Science in 1979. In 1984, he retired as a professor, but continued to research and publish throughout his retirement. He died in 2010.