Professor Maurice Brookhart
William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Chemistry
Department of Chemistry, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Banquet (6:00 pm, Palais de Jade), February 15
MAURICE BROOKHART (b. 1942) grew up in the mountains of western Maryland and attended Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore where he received an A.B. degree in chemistry in 1964. He carried out his doctoral work in physical organic chemistry at UCLA under the direction of Saul Winstein. After finishing the Ph.D. degree in 1968, he spent six months as a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow at UCLA followed by a year of study at Southampton University as a NATO postdoctoral fellow. Prof. Brookhart joined the University of North Carolina faculty in 1969 and is currently a William R. Kenan, Jr. professor of chemistry. He served as associate editor of Organometallics (1990-96) and received the 1992 ACS Award in Organometallic Chemistry, a 1994 ACS Cope Scholar Award, and the 2003 ACS Award in Polymer Chemistry. Prof. Brookhart was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1996 and the National Academy of Sciences in 2001.
Prof. Brookhart’s research interests span mechanistic, synthetic, and structural organometallic chemistry. Most recently efforts have focused on the development and mechanistic understanding of late transition metal complexes for olefin polymerizations and employing carbon-hydrogen bond activation processes in catalytic transformations of small molecules.