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Charles DuBois Coryell was an American chemist who was one of the discoverers of the element promethium.
Coryell earned a Ph.D at California Institute of Technology in 1935 as the student of Arthur A. Noyes. During the late 1930s he engaged in research on the structure of hemoglobin in association with Linus Pauling. He also taught at UCLA before 1942. In 1942 he accepted a position in the Manhattan Project, for which he was Chief of the Fission Products Section, both at the University of Chicago and at Clinton Laboratories in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. His group had responsibility for characterizing radioactive isotopes created by the fission of uranium and for developing a process for chemical separation of plutonium.
In 1945 he was a member of the Clinton Laboratories team, with Jacob Marinsky and Lawrence E. Glendenin, that isolated the previously undocumented rare earth element 61. Marinsky and Glendenin produced this element both by extraction from fission products and by bombarding neodymium with neutrons. They isolated it using ion-exchange chromatography. Publication of the finding was delayed until later due to the war. Marinsky and Glendenin announced the discovery at a meeting of the American Chemical Society in September 1947. Upon the suggestion of Coryell's wife, the team named the new element for the mythical Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods and was punished for the act by Zeus. They had also considered naming it "clintonium" for the facility where it was isolated.
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