2024 Welch Award Lecture - Dr. Eric N. Jacobsen - Selectivity and Generality in Asymmetric Catalysis

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. At NYU he was introduced to research and great teaching by Yorke Rhodes. He carried out his Ph.D. studies at U.C. Berkeley under the direction of Robert Bergman in the field of mechanistic organometallic chemistry. In 1986, he returned to the East Coast of the U.S. for an NIH postdoctoral fellowship with Barry Sharpless at MIT, where he was involved in the discovery of the osmium-catalyzed asymmetric dihydroxylation reaction. In 1988, he began his independent career at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He moved to Harvard University as full professor in the summer of 1993 and has been there ever since. 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. The recognitions he has received include the Packard Fellowship (1991), the Baekeland Medal (1999), the ACS Award for Creativity in Synthetic Organic Chemistry (2001), election to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (2004), the Mitsui Catalysis Science Award (2005), the ACS H.C. Brown Award for Synthetic Methods (2008), the Janssen Prize (2010), election to the National Academy of Sciences (2008), the Noyori Prize (2011), the Chirality Medal (2012), the Remsen Award (2013), the Esselen Award (2015), the Award for Creativity in Molecular Design and Synthesis (2016), the ACS Arthur C. Cope Award (2016), the Humboldt Research Award (2020), and the Willard Gibbs Medal (2024). He has also received over 100 plenary and named lectureships from institutions, foundations, and companies around the world

Abstract: Selectivity and Generality in Asymmetric Catalysis

Eric Jacobsen’s research group is dedicated to the discovery of useful catalytic reactions, and to the application of state-of-the art mechanistic and computational techniques to the analysis of those reactions. Several of the catalysts developed in his labs have found widespread application in industry and academia. These include metal-salen complexes for asymmetric epoxidation, conjugate additions, and hydrolytic kinetic resolution of epoxides; chromium-Schiff base complexes for a wide range of enantioselective pericyclic reactions; and organic hydrogen bond-donor catalysts for activation of neutral and cationic electrophiles. Eric's mechanistic analyses of these systems have helped uncover general principles for catalyst design, including electronic tuning of selectivity, cooperative homo- and hetero-bimetallic catalysis, privileged catalysis, hydrogen-bond donor asymmetric catalysis, and anion-binding catalysis.

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