San Diego, CA (special) -- Dr. Walter Kohn, a former member of San Diego's Jewish community, was awarded this year's Nobel Prize in chemistry for work he did at UCSD to devise a mathematical formula to describe the relationships of atoms within complex molecules. The award showed how interrelated scientific disciplines have become: Kohn was a founding faculty member of UCSD's physics department.

The professor transferred to UC-Santa Barbara in 1975, where he was associated with the Institute for International Theoretical Physics until his retirement five years ago. He is 75.

His daughter, Ingrid Kohn, a licensed social worker with Jewish Family Service here in San Diego County, said there is a bittersweet aspect to her father's notification on Oct. 13 won the Nobel Prize. 

Had he not been part of the Kindertransport of children who were moved from Germany and Austria to England before the outbreak of World War II, he likely would have been murdered with the other Six Million victims of the nazi Holocaust.

How many other great scientists, humanitarians, and theologians might also have contributed to the world as her father did, had their lives not been snuffed out in the Holocaust? Ingrid Kohn asked.

The daughter said her father has received overtures from the Austrian government who would "like to claim him as an Austrian-born Nobel laureate, but my father's position is that Austria has never taken adequate responsibility for its role in the Holocaust."

After being sent to England as a 15 year old, Kohn was moved by British authorities after the outbreak of World War II in 1939 to a prison camp for enemy aliens, from which he eventually was transferred to a prison in Quebec.

A Canadian Jewish family which had immigrated from Canada--the Mendels--sponsored both Kohn and Terry Eisinger, who also grew up to be a physicist. Kohn went on to attend the University of Toronto, where he met his first wife--Ingrid's mother--and later went to graduate school at Harvard University. He taught physics at Carnegie Tech before taking a position in 1960 at UCSD.

Ingrid Kohn said the Nobel Prize honors not only her father's work, but also the memory of his parents who had the foresight to send him out of harm's way.

The scientist visits San Diego County approximately once a month. Ingrid Kohn has two daughters, Miriam, 14, and Tova, 11; and her sister Ros Dimenstein and husband Avraham have a son, Shimon Hirsch, 1. A first cousin, Daria Flores, also lives in San Diego County. 

"He loves to visit his grandkids," Ingrid Kohn said of her father. "We all like to go to movies together at the Reuben H. Fleet Space Theatre & Science Center. Also we like to roller blade. My father roller blades at least once a week and he is very proud of that."

Kohn shares his Nobel Prize with Dr. John A Pople, a mathematician at Northwestern University whose research was conducted separately. Each scientist will receive a shade under $500,000 in award money at the Nobel Prize ceremony in Stockholm, Sweden. 

Ingrid Kohn said the San Diego branch of the Kohn family, along with another sister--Marilyn Kohn of San Francisco--all plan to attend the ceremony in Stockholm scheduled Dec. 10.