Who was Rosalind Franklin's PhD supervisor at Cambridge?

Rosalind Franklin’s PhD supervisor at Cambridge was Ronald Norrish. His full name was Ronald George Wreyford Norrish, a physical chemist who later won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Franklin began her doctoral research in physical chemistry at Cambridge after graduating from Newnham College. She worked in Norrish’s laboratory before leaving for a research position at the British Coal Utilisation Research Association in 1942. Her coal research became the foundation of the doctoral thesis Cambridge awarded in 1945.

Franklin reportedly became dissatisfied with Norrish’s lack of enthusiasm for her work, and the relationship was not an especially productive one. That experience helped shape her decision to pursue research elsewhere, where she developed the experimental expertise that later made her a leading X-ray crystallographer.

The other options are associated with different parts of her scientific story. Max Perutz was a major figure in molecular biology, Linus Pauling was an American chemist who proposed an incorrect DNA model, and John Desmond Bernal later became Franklin’s colleague and mentor at Birkbeck. None was her Cambridge PhD supervisor.