Richard R. Schrock

Richard Royce Schrock ( born January 4, 1945 in Berne, Indiana) is an American chemist and Nobel laureate.

Life

Schrock attended high school in San Diego and graduated from the University of California at Riverside and got there in 1967 his Bachelor of Science. In 1971 he earned his doctorate at Harvard University. He then spent a year at the University of Cambridge and three years at the chemical company DuPont.

Since 1975 he works at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is Professor since 1980. Since 1989 he has held the Frederick G Keyes Chair at MIT. Schrock is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences.

Schrock is co-founder and board member of XIMO AG, a company based in Switzerland, which is focused on the development and application of metathesis catalysts own.

He is married and has two children.

Work

Schrock research in the field of organometallic chemistry, synthetic chemistry, inorganic chemistry, on catalysts and polymers. In particular, he has been researching on catalysts for olefin metathesis and ring-opening metathesis polymerizations. In 1990, he managed to develop a highly reactive catalyst for olefin metathesis, which is compatible with several functional groups. The metathesis catalysts from the research group of Robert Grubbs, the so-called Grubbs catalysts, although less reactive, but compatible with almost all functional groups. Therefore, they are used in organic synthesis frequently.

In October 2005 he was awarded, together with Yves Chauvin and Robert Grubbs for his contributions to the " development of Metathesemethode in organic synthesis " with the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. In 2013 he received an honorary doctorate at the RWTH Aachen