First Ph.D. in sciences awarded in 1967
Linda Truitt Creagh makes UNT history and sets course as forward-thinking research chemist
North Texas State University, now UNT, conferred its first doctorate in the sciences in 1967 when Linda Truitt Creagh, right, earned her Ph.D. in chemistry.
Studying under her father, Price Truitt, she used a new tool, a nuclear magnetic resonance instrument, to study physical organic chemistry in new ways.
She used this technology to look more closely at triazoles, simple compounds that consist of carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen.
“It helped us understand the mechanisms of how these compounds react, how the reactions actually happen,” Creagh says.
After earning her degree, she worked as a research chemist for Texas Instruments. There, her team helped advance the liquid crystal display (LCD) technology, which the company first introduced in wristwatches. Later, she worked for Xerox in Dallas on ink jets for some of the early ink-jet printers before joining a spinoff company, Spectra, which manufactures ink-jet printers used in industrial and commercial printing. Fuji Film later bought that company, and it became FujiFilm Dimatix. She retired in 2008.