About
Our mission is to provide a community of equity, compassion, growth and opportunity for all students by preparing lifelong learners for success in education and careers as engaged citizens and leaders in a global society.
Our school serves over 800 students from a wide range of backgrounds. Along with comprehensive core instruction, our school offers an array of opportunities through electives, early bird offerings, after-school athletics, and learning clubs. Linus Pauling is Corvallis School District’s host middle school for the dual immersion (DI) program. About one-fourth of our students participate in DI, which includes at least two periods of instruction each day in Spanish.
Who Was Linus Pauling?
Our school was named in honor of Linus Carl Pauling, who was born in Portland, Oregon on February 28, 1901. He attended public schools in Condon and Portland, Oregon and entered Oregon State College (now OSU) in 1917, receiving the degree of BS in chemical engineering in 1922.
While at OSC, he worked as a full-time teacher of quantitative analysis in 1919-1920. He was appointed a Teaching Fellow in Chemistry at the California Institute of Technology and was a graduate student there from 1922-1925. In 1925, at the age of 24, he was awarded the Ph.D. (summa cum laude) in chemistry, with minors in physics and mathematics.
His interest lay in the field of molecular structure and the nature of chemical bonds. He was a member of numerous professional societies in the United States and abroad, the author of hundreds of papers and many books, and he received awards in the US and Europe. He is distinguished as the only person to have been awarded two unshared Nobel Prizes; the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1954 and the Nobel Peace Prize in 1962.
He married Ava Helen Miller in 1923, and they had four children, Linus Carl Jr. (1925), Peter Jeffress (1931), Linda Helen (1932), and Edward Crellin (1937) and many grandchildren. Linus C. Pauling died August 19, 1994. Oregon State University maintains the Ava Helen and Linus Pauling papers in the Valley Library’s Special Collections and Archives Research Center.
