Maurice Brookhart

Maurice S. Brookhart is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Chemistry (1990 to the present) in the Department of Chemistry at the University of North Carolina.

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Brookhart received his Bachelor of Science from Johns Hopkins University in 1964. He received his Ph.D. in 1968 from the University of California, Los Angeles, in physical organic chemistry where his thesis advisor was Saul Winstein. After an NSF postdoctoral fellowships at the University of California, Los Angeles in 1968 and a NATO postdoctoral fellowship at Southampton University, England in 1969, he joined the faculty of the University of North Carolina.

His research group is noted for its research in the general area of synthetic and mechanistic organometallic chemistry. A recent major thrust has been the development of post-metallocene catalysts based upon late transition metal complexes for olefin coordination polymerization. They carry out their mechanistic investigation of the polymerization reactions primarily by low temperature IR and NMR spectroscopies. The work provides a detailed understanding of catalyst resting states and relative intermediates.

A second major focus of Brookhart’s group concerns fundamental studies of C-H and C-C bond activations by transition metal complexes and the incorporation of these bond activation steps into catalytic cycles. They have successfully demonstrated catalysis of the ortho-alkylation of aromatic ketones, alkyl aldehyde isomerization, hydroacylation, and the dehydrogenation of alkoxy silanes to generate silyl enol ethers.

As of 2007, he has 210 publications in the scientific literature and holds 22 US patents.

Brookhart’s honors and responsibilities include the following: Editorial Advisory Board, Organometallics, (1987-89); ACS Petroleum Research Fund Advisory Board, (1989-1991); Associate Editor, Organometallics, January (1990-1996); ACS Award in Organometallic Chemistry (1992); North Carolina Section ACS Distinguished Speaker Award (1992); ACS A. C. Cope Scholar Award (1994); Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Fellowship (1995); Elected, American Academy of Arts and Sciences Fellow, (1996); Medicinal Chemistry Study Section, DRG, NIH (1997-2001); Editorial Advisory Boards: Journal of Organic Chemistry, Organic Letters, Journal of Polymer Science, Advanced Synthesis and Catalysis; ACS Cooperative Research Award in Polymer Science and Engineering with Lynda K. Johnson (1998); Charles H. Stone Award (Piedmont Section, ACS) (1998); Royal Chemical Society Centenary Lecturer (2000); Honorary Doctorate, University of Rennes, France (2000); Senior Research Fellowship of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Marburg, Germany (2001); Elected, Member of National Academy of Sciences (2001), ACS Award in Polymer Chemistry (2003), Chemistry Division Review Committee, Los Alamos National Laboratory (2002-2005)