Herbert L. Strauss

Herbert Leopold Strauss (March 26, 1936 – December 2, 2014) was an American chemist who specialized in spectroscopy. His family fled Nazi Germany and eventually immigrated to New York, where he graduated from Columbia University. He spent the entirety of his career at the University of California, Berkeley.

Early life and education Herbert Leopold Strauss, who went by "Herb", was born on March 26, 1936, in Aachen, Germany to parents Joan and Charles Strauss. He had a younger brother, Walter. The Strauss family escaped Germany in 1939, arriving in England. While in London, Herbert Strauss was temporarily placed in an orphanage, where he became seriously ill from bronchitis and nearly died. The family eventually immigrated to Kew Gardens, Queens in New York City. There, his father worked as a real estate agent and his mother worked in a clothing store. In 1994, he won both the Bomem-Michelson Prize for Spectroscopy and the Lippincott Award for Vibrational Spectroscopy. In 2003 he received the Berkeley Citation and Berkeley Faculty Service Award.