Urey spent a year in the United Kingdom as a visiting professor at Oxford University in 1956 and 1957. In 1958, he reached the University of Chicago's retirement age of 65, but he accepted a post as a professor at large at the new University of California, San Diego (UCSD), and moved to La Jolla, California. He was subsequently made a professor emeritus there from 1970 to 1981. Urey helped build up the science faculty there. He was one of the founding members of UCSD's school of chemistry, which was created in 1960, along with Stanley Miller, Hans Suess, and Jim Arnold.