Maurice S. Brookhart

Professor Maurice S. Brookhart is a Professor of Chemistry at University of Houston. Formerly, he is a W. R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Chemistry at UNC at Chapel Hill. His works are on organometallic chemistry and catalysis and he contributed to understanding of the mechanisms of hydrocarbon activation and olefin polymerization. He served as associate editor of Organometallics (1990-95) and received ACS Awards in Organometallic Chemistry(1992), Polymer Chemistry(2003) and the Somerjai Award for Creative Research in Catalysis(2015). He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2001 and received the North Carolina Award in Science in 2008 and the Willard Gibbs Medal in 2010. Brookhart’s research interests span mechanistic, synthetic, and structural organometallic chemistry and catalysis. Most of his work has focused on the development and mechanistic understanding of late transition metal complexes for olefin polymerizations and the employment of C-H and Si-H bond activation processes in catalytic transformations of small molecules, particularly hydrocarbons.