Alan Graham MacDiarmid (24 April 1927 - ) is a chemist. He was one of three people awarded the 2002 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for work on conductive polymers.

MacDiarmid was born in Masterton, New Zealand. His family was relatively poor, and the Great Depression made life difficult. At around age ten, he developed an interest in chemistry from one of his father's old textbooks, and he instructed himself on the subject from this book and from library books. He later worked as an assistant at the chemistry department of Victoria University of Wellington, and eventually studied there. He graduated in 1951 with first class honours, and won a Fulbright Fellowship to the University of Wisconsin for a PhD. He later worked at the University of St Andrews and at the University of Pennsylvania.

The MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology at Victoria University is named after him.

External links

• MacDiarmid's page at the University of Pennsylvania http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~macdiarm/
• New Zealand Edge biography http://www.nzedge.com/heroes/macdiarmid.html