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.

Maurice Brookhart
File:Brookhart Maurice.jpg
Born	(1943-Missing required parameter 1=month!-00)Missing required parameter 1=month! , 1943 North Carolina
Residence	United States
Citizenship	United States
Fields	Organometallic chemistry
Institutions	[[University of Houston] 2015-present [University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill]] 1969-2015 Postdoctoral Fellowships University of California, Los Angeles, Southampton University Visiting professorships University of Wisconsin, Fall 1974 University of Rennes, Spring 1981 University of Oxford, 1982-83 University of Rennes, Spring 1987 University of Bordeaux, June 1989 CNRS, Toulouse, France, July 1989 University of California Berkeley, Fall 1996 Instituto de Investigaciones Quimicas, Spring 1997 University of Marburg, Spring 2001, Max Planck Institute, Muelheim, Spring 2003
Alma mater	Johns Hopkins, UCLA
Doctoral advisor	Saul Winstein
Doctoral students	Stefan Mecking Lynda K. Johnson(Postdoc)
Known for	Mechanisms in organometallic chemistry
Notable awards	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) American Academy of Arts and Sciences Fellow, (1996) ACS Cooperative Research Award in Polymer Science and Engineering with Lynda K. Johnson (1998) Charles H. Stone Award (Piedmont Section, ACS) (1998) Chemical Society Centenary Lecturer (2000) Honorary Doctorate, University of Rennes, France (2000) Senior Research Fellowship of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Marburg, Germany (2001) Member of National Academy of Sciences (2001) ACS Award in Polymer Chemistry (2003) Editorial Boards Organometallics (1987-89) Associate Editor, Organometallics (1990-1996) Journal of Organic Chemistry Organic Letters Journal of Polymer Science Part A Advanced Synthesis and Catalysis Advisory Boards ACS Petroleum Research Fund (1989-1991) Medicinal Chemistry Study Section, DRG, NIH (1997-2001) Chemistry Division Review Committee, Los Alamos National Laboratory (2002-2005)

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 fellowship 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, where he stayed until 2015, when he joined the University of Houston as a professor of Chemistry.

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. Recent work on alkane metathesis has received attention.

He has over 200 publications in the scientific literature and holds over 22 US patents. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.