Schrock

Richard R. Schrock received his B.A. degree in 1967 from the University of California at Riverside and his Ph.D. degree from Harvard University in 1971. He spent a year as an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at Cambridge University, followed by three years in the Central Research and Development Department of E. I. duPont de Nemours and Company. In 1975, he joined M.I.T. where he became full professor in 1980 and Frederick G. Keyes Professor of Chemistry in 1989. He is currently the F. G. Keyes Professor Emeritus of Chemistry at MIT, the George K. Helmkamp Professor of Chemistry at the University of California, Riverside, and an adjunct professor at ISIS, Université de Strasbourg.

His interests include the fundamental organometallic chemistry of high oxidation state alkylidene and alkylidyne complexes of molybdenum and tungsten, as well as catalytic reactions and reaction mechanisms involving alkylidene complexes, in particular olefin metathesis reactions. He is perhaps best known for his discovery of ‘high oxidation state carbenes’ (alkylidene complexes) by abstraction of alpha-hydrogen in high oxidation state metal alkyl complexes. In recent years, he has applied alkylidene chemistry to the controlled polymerisation of cyclic olefins via ring-opening metathesis polymerisation (ROMP) and to organic chemistry in collaboration with Amir H. Hoveyda.

R. R. Schrock was an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow and Camille and Henry Dreyfus Research Fellow. He received the ACS Prize in Organometallic Chemistry (1985), the Harrison Howe Award from the ACS Rochester Section (1990), an Alexander von Humboldt Award (1995), the ACS Prize in Inorganic Chemistry (1996), the Bailar Medal from the University of Illinois (1998), and an ACS Cope Scholar Award in 2001. He was the Sir Geoffrey Wilkinson Lecturer and Medalist (2002) and the Sir Edward Frankland Award Lecturer (2004), received the F. Albert Cotton Award in Synthetic Inorganic Chemistry (2006), the Theodore Richards Medal of the North Eastern ACS Section (2006), and the August Wilhelm von Hofmann Medal of the German Chemical Society (2005). In 2005, he shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Y. Chauvin and R. H. Grubbs. In 2014, he received the Paracelsus Prize from the Swiss Chemical Society. He has received honorary doctorates from the universities of Zaragoza, Rennes, St. Andrews and RWTH Aachen. He has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences, and is a foreign member of the Royal Society. He was Associate Editor of Organometallics for eight years and has published over 615 research papers.