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Richard R. Schrock was born in Indiana but spent his high school years in San Diego, California. In 1967, he obtained his B.A. degree from the University of California at Riverside. He attended graduate school at Harvard University, where he received his Ph.D. in 1971 as a student of J. A. Osborn. He spent one year as an NSF postdoctoral fellow at Cambridge University working in the group of Lord Jack Lewis. In 1972, he was hired by E. I. DuPont de Nemours and Company, where he worked in the group of George Parshall. He joined the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1975 and became full professor in 1980. Since 1989, he has been the Frederick G. Keyes Professor of Chemistry.
Professor Schrock's interests include kinetic and mechanistic studies of high oxidation state early metal organometallic species, as well as polymer synthesis and characterization. He is perhaps best known as the discoverer of high oxidation state carbene (alkylidene) complexes. These high oxidation state carbenes are now commonly called Schrock carbenes and are the active catalysts in olefin metathesis reactions. Professor Schrock has demonstrated the preparation of alkylidyne complexes, including several versions that are active for alkyne metathesis. He has also studied ring-opening-metathesis polymerization (ROMP) of cyclic olefins and controlled polymerization of acetylenes to give polyenes of potential interest as non-linear optical materials.
In addition to enormous strides in the chemistry of metal-carbon bonds, Professor Schrock has made important contributions to transition metal-pnictogen chemistry. These include seminal papers in the binding and reduction of dinitrogen and the first reported example of a terminal transition metal-phosphorus triple bond complex. In recent years, he has also developed new amido ligands for early transition metal chemistry, catalysts for living Ziegler-Natta polymerization of olefins, and molybdenum imido alkylidene catalysts for asymmetric ring closing metathesis.
Professor Schrock has been an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow, Camille and Henry Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar, Royal Society Centenary Lecturer and Medalist (1991), and Alexander von Humboldt Fellow (1995). He received the ACS Award in Organometallic Chemistry (1985), Harrison Howe Award of the Rochester ACS section (1990), ACS Award in Inorganic Chemistry (1996), Bailar Medal from the University of Illinois (1998), and the ACS Cope Scholar Award (2001). He has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences. He was Associate Editor of the American Chemical Society Journal Organometallics for eight years, has published more than 360 research papers, and has supervised over 100 Ph.D. students and postdocs.
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