Eric Jacobsen

Eric N. Jacobsen ( born April 22, 1960 in New York City ) is an American chemist who holds the Sheldon Emery Professor of Chemistry at the Institute of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard University since July 2001.

Life and work

He studied at New York University, 1986 PhD from the University of California at Robert Bergman and then moved as a postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the group of Barry Sharpless. He then worked from 1988 to 1993 at the University of Illinois as an Associate Professor and Assistant Professor, before he a professor at the Harvard University in Cambridge followed as University Professor in 1993.

Jacobson was known especially for the development of the Jacobsen epoxidation. His interest lies in " all aspects of the selective catalysis, and particularly the design, discovery and study of systems that mediate fundamentally interesting and useful organic reactions ."

Currently (Jan. 2009) dealt his group with the following topics:

• Asymmetric Catalysis
• Selective C -C bond formation and cleavage
• Enzymatic oxidation
• Imitation of physiologically important enzymes
• New concepts for the design of catalysts

He is married and has three daughters.

Honors

Jakobsen received numerous honors and awards. In 1990 he was awarded the NSF Presidential Young Investigator award and a year later with the Packard Fellowship. In 1993 he received the Cope Scholar Award of the American Chemical Society ( ACS) and the 1994 Fluka Reagent of the Year award. In 1996 he was awarded the Thieme- IUPAC Price in Synthetic Organic Chemistry, 2001, he was awarded the ACS for Creativity in Organic Chemistry, 2005, Mitsui Catalysis Science Awards, 2010 the Ryoji Noyori Prize and the 2013 Remsen Award.