Characterised in the popular press as ”the father of the contraceptive pill”, he was a pioneer in many fields: steroid chemistry and optical rotatory dispersion in the 1950s, the application of mass spectrometry and NMR spectroscopy to organic chemistry in the 1960s, computer-aided structure determination in the 1970s.

Djerassi’s new approach to structure determination came to Cambridge through the appointment of his postdoc, Dudley Williams in 1964, a lineage continued to today through Jeremy Sanders and Chris Hunter. 

In later life he switched from chemistry to art collecting and writing science-in-fiction plays and novels. Djerassi was also a donor to the Cambridge Centre for Gender Studies, creating the Diane Middlebrook and Carl Djerassi Visiting Professorship in memory of his late wife.