Elizabeth Kempson Mrs. Percival

The only woman to be mentioned in the history of the Chemistry Department at the University of Edinburgh was Elizabeth E. Kempson.79 Bom on 3 January 1906 in Coventry, she was educated at Wolverhampton High School and obtained an honours degree in chemistry at the University of Birmingham in 1928. She stayed in Birmingham, undertaking research with Norman Haworth.80 Haworth s senior research assistant was Edmund George Vincent Percival, and in 1934 Kempson and Percival married. 

That same year, Percival was appointed to a lectureship at the University of Edinburgh, where Kempson started research with him on the synthesis and reactions of carbohydrates, for which she received a Ph.D. in 1941. With the founding of the Scottish Seaweed Research Association, their interest turned to marine polysaccharides. Percival died in 1951 and Kempson took over the research, being appointed Lecturer, while raising two children. For her contributions to polysaccharide chemistry, she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. 

In 1962, she married Richard McDowell of Alginate Industries Ltd., and together they wrote the monograph, Chemistry and Enzymology of Seaweed Polysaccharides.81 Kempson then moved to Royal Holloway College as an Honorary Lecturer, where she built up a new research group. Her collaborators included 26 Ph.D. students, and resulted in more than 100 publications. 

During her lifetime, an issue of the journal Carbohydrate Research was dedicated to her, as a tribute to her work. In the introduction, one of her former students, Helmut Weigel, commented  

Percival is an ardent traveller. In her journeyings, which have taken her to all continents, she always combines a taxing lecture programme with the collection of seaweeds — sometimes a very hazardous occupation — and with visits to former 

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