William H. Pirkle received his B.S. from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1958 and his Ph.D. from the University of Rochester in 1963. He joined the faculty at Illinois in 1964. His research interests are in organic chemistry. Research in his group entailed the use of chromatographic and spectroscopic (especially NMR) techniques to study the details of how one enantiomer of a substance discriminates between the enantiomers of other substances.