Herbert Sander Gutowsky was an American chemist who was a Professor of Chemistry at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His pioneering work made nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy one of the most effective tools in chemical and medical research. Herbert S. Gutowsky was born on November 8, 1919 in Bridgman, Michigan. Gutowsky received a bachelor's degree from Indiana University in 1940, and after a four-year interruption for military service, he was awarded a master's degree from the University of California at Berkeley in 1946. Gutowsky earned his Ph.D. in chemistry from Harvard University under George Kistiakowsky and joined the faculty of the University of Illinois in 1948. He became a full professor in 1956. His research interests as a young faculty member included molecular and solid-state structure and infrared and radio frequency spectroscopy, including nuclear magnetic resonance and electron paramagnetic resonance.

Gutowsky received many awards, including two from the American Chemical Society, the Irving Langmuir Award in Chemical Physics in 1966 and the Peter Debye Award in Physical Chemistry in 1975. He was also awarded the prestigious National Medal of Science in 1977 and the Wolf Prize in Chemistry in 1983. He was appointed a fellow of the University of Illinois Center for Advanced Study in 1983, and received the Pittsburgh Spectroscopy Award in 1992 and the John Kuebler Award of the Alpha Chi Sigma professional fraternity. Gutowsky became head of the Department of Chemistry at Illinois in 1967, and in 1970 he oversaw the creation of the School of Chemical Sciences, which included the departments of chemistry and chemical engineering. He served as Director of the School of Chemical Sciences from 1970 to 1983. He then returned to teaching and research, moving into a second research career in Fourier-transform microwave spectroscopic studies of small, weakly bonded molecules in the gas phase. He died January 13, 2000.