George A. Olah served as the Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Distinguished Professor of Organic Chemistry in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Southern California (USC), where he also held appointments in Chemical Engineering and Materials Science. He joined USC in 1977, bringing his research group from Case Western Reserve University, where he had been a professor and department chair since 1965. Olah founded the Loker Hydrocarbon Research Institute at USC in 1977, serving as its director and establishing it as a premier center for advanced hydrocarbon research with funding from Donald and Katherine Loker. Earlier in his career, after studying chemistry at the Technical University of Budapest and working at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences' Central Chemical Research Institute from 1954, he emigrated to Canada in 1957 following the Hungarian Revolution, joining Dow Chemical Company. There, he advanced to research positions in Sarnia and later Massachusetts before academia.

Olah's groundbreaking research on carbocations and superacids transformed organic chemistry, earning him the 1994 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for contributions to carbocation chemistry. He developed superacid media, such as "magic acid," to stabilize elusive carbocations, enabling their spectroscopic characterization and mechanistic studies of electrophilic reactions like Friedel-Crafts alkylations. His later work explored superelectrophiles and the "methanol economy," advocating methanol from CO2 and hydrogen as a carbon-neutral fuel and feedstock. A prolific scholar, Olah published nearly 1,500 papers and authored or edited 20 books, including "Hydrocarbon Chemistry" with Árpád Molnár (2003), "A Life of Magic Chemistry: Autobiographical Reflections of a Nobel Prize Winner" (2001), "Onium Ions" (1998), and "Beyond Oil and Gas: The Methanol Economy" with Alain Goeppert and G.K. Surya Prakash (2006). He held over 160 patents across seven countries. Among numerous honors, he received the American Chemical Society's Priestley Medal (2005), the Eric and Sheila Samson Prime Minister's Prize for Innovation in Alternative Fuels (2013, shared with Prakash), fellowship in the Royal Society, and membership in the National Academy of Sciences and National Academy of Engineering. Olah mentored more than 300 scientists over four decades at USC, profoundly impacting the field of chemistry and sustainable energy.