A BLUE plaque to commemorate the only British woman to be awarded a Nobel Prize for science will be unveiled tomorrow.

The work of Dorothy Hodgkin, a Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, with penicillin gave medical experts more knowledge about the drug to treat the masses.

The Oxfordshire Blue Plaques Board has decided to honour her with a plaque at her house in Woodstock Road, where she lived from 1957 to 1968 with her husband Thomas, their three children and her sister, Joan, and her five children.

The board have applied for permission from Oxford City Council to put up the plaque, which recognises and raises awareness of people, places or events of lasting significance in the life of Oxfordshire.

The board's secretary, Eda Forbes said "Dorothy Hodgkin still remains a very famous Oxford academic and resident.

"She was the first British woman to win the Nobel Prize and still is the only one since 1964. She is only one of three women in the world to win the prize.

"She is a well known household name in many circles so it made it obvious to get a plaque."

Mrs Hodgkin, who is remembered as a great scientist and a warm, gentle and supportive person, attended Somerville College to read chemistry in 1928.

The undergraduate course at that time did not include X-ray crystallography – a tool used for identifying the atomic and molecular structure of a crystal – but she had the opportunity to do her fourth year research.

She began her life’s work on the structures of medically important chemicals such as antibiotics, vitamins and proteins and in 1934 she became a research fellow at Somerville, later, a lifelong fellow and tutor.

The mother-of-three was at first given a somewhat makeshift laboratory of her own in the University Museum of Natural History, but by 1945 she had determined through X-ray diffraction techniques the structure of penicillin, by 1955 that of Vitamin B12 and by 1969 the structure of insulin.

In 1947 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and in 1964 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

This honour was followed in 1965 by her appointment to the Order of Merit.

By now, a figure of international standing, she gave her support to causes close to her heart and in 1975 she became President of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs campaigning against nuclear weapons.

In 1993, the year before her death, though frail and confined to a wheelchair, she made the journey to Beijing to attend the International Congress of Crystallography.

The plaque will be unveiled at 94 Woodstock Road at 3pm on by Professor Elspeth Garman, a leading crystallographer.