Nobel Prize-Winning Scientist. A New Zealand born American chemist, he received world-wide notoriety upon being awarded the 2000 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He equally shared the coveted prize with American chemist Alan J. Heeger and Japanese chemist, Shirakawa Hideki. According to the Nobel Prize committee, the three chemists received the Nobel Prize "for the discovery and development of conductive polymers." Born, Alan Graham MacDiarmid, the next to the youngest of five children, his father was a successful engineer. With his father's ability to support the family diminishing during the Great Depression, his older siblings went to work early leaving behind their education, yet he was able to continue until age sixteen before getting a low-paying janitorial position in a laboratory at Victoria University College. At the age of seventeen, he passed the examination to enter pre-med courses but did not have the financial means to enter medical school. He began to take a couple of college courses as a part-time student, eventually earning a Bachelors Science degree and becoming a demonstrator before earning a Master's in Science. He published his first scientific paper in 1949. He paid his way through college and only later did he receive scholarships or fellowships. In 1950, he received a Fullbright Fellowship from the United States State Department to earn a Ph.D. in 1953 at the University of Wisconsin. After being elected by the Department of Chemistry to the position of Knapp Research Fellow, he lived on campus without rent. This followed with him receiving the New Zealand Shell graduate scholarship to study silicon hydrides at Cambridge University in England. After receiving another PhD in 1955, he accepted a junior faculty position at Queens College of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, before being accepted as a junior position on the faculty of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania. He stayed at the University of Pennsylvania for 45 years, becoming full professor in 1964 and Blanchard Professor of Chemistry in 1988. He became a naturalize American citizen in the late 1960s. In 2002 MacDiarmid also joined the faculty of the University of Texas at Dallas. In 1975 he and Heeger began researching together. In the mid-1970s on a visit to Japan, he met Shirakawa and learned of his research in plastics. In 1977 the three men, collaborating at the University of Pennsylvania with funding from the United States Navy, made their discoveries in plastics, which were published and led to the Nobel Prize. Besides the Nobel Prize, he was also awarded the 1993 Calmer Award from the Franklin Institute, 1999 American Chemical Society Award in Materials Chemistry, and the 2000 Rutherford Medal, New Zealand's highest science award. The MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology at Victoria University in New Zealand is named after him. He published over 600 scientific papers and held some 20 patents. In 2001 he was made a member of the Order of New Zealand, the country's highest honor. The oldest of these three Nobel Prize recipients, he died first in 2007. He married and the couple had four children.