Eric N. Jacobsen

Eric Jacobsen was born in New York City of Cuban parents, received his primary and secondary education at the Lycée Français de New York, and graduated from New York University in 1982 with a B.S. in Chemistry. His Ph.D. work was done at U.C. Berkeley under the direction of Robert Bergman, and his postdoctoral studies at MIT as an NIH fellow with Barry Sharpless. In 1988, he began his independent career at the University of Illinois. He moved to Harvard University as full professor in the summer of 1993. He was named the Sheldon Emory Professor of Organic Chemistry in 2001, and served as Chair of the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology between 2010 and 2015. His research group is dedicated to discovering useful catalytic reactions, and to applying state-of-the art mechanistic and computational techniques to the analysis of those reactions.