Paul Kuroda

Paul Kazuo Kuroda (1 April 1917 – 16 April 2001) was a Japanese-American chemist and nuclear scientist.

He held the esteemed title of honorary professor at the University of Arkansas and is widely recognized as the pioneering scientist who achieved the distinction of becoming the first individual from Japan to naturalize in the United States.

He employed Enrico Fermi's recently unveiled reactor theory to propose the possibility of the formation of natural atomic reactors under suitable conditions in ancient uranium deposits where the ratio of uranium-235 to uranium-238 was higher than its present value.

Furthermore, he demonstrated the presence of plutonium-244 in the early solar system by analyzing the xenon content released from meteorites, which is believed to have been emitted during nuclear fission of Pu-244. He supervised 64 Ph.D. students and authored or co-authored around 400 publications.

Life
He was born on April 1, 1917, in Fukuoka Prefecture, Japan. He died on April 16, 2001, at his home in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Career
He received bachelors and doctoral degrees from the Imperial University of Tokyo. He studied under Professor Kenjiro Kimura.

His first paper was published in 1935. He focused mostly on radio and cosmochemistry, and most of his 40 papers published prior to 1944 are about the chemistry of hot springs. In 1944, he became the youngest faculty member of the Imperial University of Tokyo, and after World War II, despite the ban on radiochemistry in Japan, he continued to study radiochemistry until 1949.

On arrival to the United States in 1949, he met with nuclear chemist, Glenn Seaborg. He became an assistant professor of chemistry at the University of Arkansas in 1952, becoming a US citizen in 1955.

In 1956, Kuroda was the first to propose that natural self-sustaining nuclear chain reactions were possible. Such a reactor was discovered in September 1972 in the Oklo Mines of Gabon.

He became the first Edgar Wertheim Distinguished Professor of Chemistry in 1979, he officially retired from the University of Arkansas in 1987.

Honours
He is the winner of the Pure Chemistry Prize.