Honorary Academician
Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2005
Date of admittance: 17/07/2018
Speech in reply by: Dr. Ramón Cugat Bertomeu
Chemist and American university professor, awarded with the Nobel Prize for his work in the field of organic chemistry, specifically in metatase reactions, which have allowed to synthesize substances with little toxic waste.
Richard R. Schrock earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Riverside, in 1967 and his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1971. He then completed a one-year postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Cambridge with an NSF grant, followed by three years in the Central Research and Development Department at E. I. duPont de Nemours and Company. In 1975, he joined M.I.T., where he became a full professor in 1980 and was appointed the Frederick G. Keyes Professor of Chemistry in 1989. Currently, he is an Emeritus Professor at MIT, holds the George K. Helmkamp Chair at the University of California, Riverside, and is a Visiting Professor at ISIS, University of Strasbourg.
His research focuses on the organometallic chemistry of molybdenum and tungsten alkylidene and alkylidyne complexes in high oxidation states, as well as catalytic reactions and reaction mechanisms involving these compounds, particularly olefin metathesis. He is best known for discovering high oxidation state alkylidene complexes through alpha-hydrogen abstraction in metal alkyl complexes. In recent years, he has applied alkylidene chemistry to the controlled polymerization of cyclic olefins via ring-opening metathesis polymerization (ROMP) and to organic synthesis in collaboration with Amir H. Hoveyda.
Throughout his career, he has received numerous distinctions, including the ACS Award in Organometallic Chemistry (1985), the Harrison Howe Award (1990), the Alexander von Humboldt Award (1995), the ACS Award in Inorganic Chemistry (1996), and the Bailar Medal from the University of Illinois (1998). He also received the ACS Cope Scholar Award in 2001 and was named the Sir Geoffrey Wilkinson Lecturer and Medalist (2002) and the Sir Edward Frankland Prize Lecturer (2004). Additionally, he was awarded the F. Albert Cotton Award in Synthetic Inorganic Chemistry (2006), the Theodore Richards Medal from the Northeast ACS section (2006), and the August Wilhelm von Hofmann Medal from the German Chemical Society (2005). In 2005, he was one of the recipients of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, alongside Y. Chauvin and R. H. Grubbs. In 2014, he received the Paracelsus Prize from the Swiss Chemical Society. He has also been awarded honorary doctorates from the universities of Zaragoza, Rennes, St. Andrews, and RWTH Aachen. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and a foreign member of the Royal Society. For eight years, he served as Associate Editor of Organometallics and has published over 615 scientific papers.
