D. MEAD JOHNSON, A&S 1936, was encouraged to apply to Johns Hopkins by his father, who had collaborated with two Hopkins scientists in the development of vitamin D for the prevention of rickets.
During World War II, Mead Johnson served as a volunteer with Britain’s armed forces and was decorated by both the British and French governments. He had been excluded from combat service with United States forces because of back problems.
After the war, he joined Mead Johnson, the pharmaceuticals firm founded by his grandfather, where as president and chief executive officer he built the medium-sized business into a worldwide marketer of nutritional products and pharmaceuticals. The company merged in 1969 with Bristol-Myers. Mr. Johnson, a university trustee from 1977 to 1993, endowed this professorship during the Hopkins Hundreds campaign. At the time of his death in 1993, he was an emeritus trustee.
Held by David R. Yarkony
DAVID R. YARKONY, the D. Mead Johnson Professor of Chemistry, is a world leader in the theoretical study of electronically nonadiabatic processes–those in which the Born-Oppenheimer approximation breaks down. The Born-Oppenheimer approximation is at the heart of the description of most chemical processes. Light harvesting, vision, and essential upper-atmospheric processes depend on electronically nonadiabatic steps. While this has been known for decades, in the last ten years our way of thinking about electronically nonadiabatic processes has begun to change dramatically–the consequence of rethinking the role of conical intersections in these processes. Dr. Yarkony’s research has helped lead this revolution, developing the tools for studying conical intersections that define the state of the art in this area. Joining Hopkins in 1977, Dr. Yarkony is a fellow of the American Physical Society and serves on the advisory boards of World Scientific Publishing, Theoretical Chemistry Accounts, and Theoretical and Computational Chemistry.