Dr. Eric Jacobsen, the Sheldon Emery Professor of Chemistry at Harvard University’s Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, has been selected to receive the 2026 F.A. Cotton Medal for Excellence in Chemical Research.
The medal, which is named for one of the most honored faculty members in Texas A&M University’s history, is jointly awarded each year by the Texas A&M Department of Chemistry and the Texas A&M Section of the American Chemical Society (ACS) in tribute to Dr. F. Albert Cotton, a Texas A&M distinguished professor of chemistry widely considered one of the world’s foremost inorganic chemists. He was the inaugural medal recipient in 1995; he passed away in 2007.
Jacobsen will be honored during the Cotton Medal symposium at the Interdisciplinary Life Sciences Building Auditorium. He will deliver his keynote presentation, “Studies in Selective Catalysis,” at 4:30 p.m. He will be preceded by Dr. Zachary Wickens of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who will present “Selective Synthesis using Light and Electricity;” and Dr. Noah Burns of Stanford University, who will present “Natural Products as Inspiration for Chemical Synthesis and Beyond.”
The symposium will be followed by a closed dinner where Jacobsen will receive the medal.
Jacobsen was born in New York City, raised in lower Manhattan and Queens. He graduated from New York University in 1982 with a B.S. in Chemistry.
He completed his Ph.D. at UC Berkeley in mechanistic organometallic chemistry under the direction of Dr. Robert Bergman. In 1986, Jacobsen joined Dr. Karl Barry Sharpless at MIT for a National Institutes of Health postdoctoral fellowship, where he participated in the early development of the asymmetric dihydroxylation reaction. In 1988, he began his independent career at the University of Illinois.
Jacobsen moved to Harvard University as a full professor in the summer of 1993. He was named the Sheldon Emory Professor of Organic Chemistry in 2001 and served as chair of the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology between 2010 and 2015. In 2024, Jacobsen became associate editor for Journal of the American Chemistry Society. Other recognitions include the Arthur C. Cope Medal and Roger Adams Award of the American Chemical Society, the Welch Prize, the Tetrahedron Prize, the Chirality Medal and election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
The Jacobsen research group at Harvard is dedicated to discovering selective catalytic reactions, and to applying state-of-the art mechanistic and computational techniques to the analysis of those reactions. Several of the catalysts developed in his labs have found widespread applications in industry and academia. These include metal-salen complexes for asymmetric epoxidation, conjugate additions and hydrolytic kinetic resolution of epoxides; chromium-Schiff base complexes for a wide range of enantioselective pericyclic reactions; and organic hydrogen-bond-donor catalysts for activation of neutral and ionic electrophiles.
The Jacobsen group’s mechanistic analyses of these systems have helped uncover general principles for catalyst design, including electronic tuning of selectivity, cooperative homo- and hetero-bimetallic catalysis, privileged catalysis, hydrogen-bond donor asymmetric catalysis and anion-binding catalysis.
Cotton came to Texas A&M as the Robert A. Welch Distinguished Professor of Chemistry in 1972 from MIT, where at age 31 in 1961, he became the youngest MIT full professor. His 35-year career at Texas A&M revolutionized several fields of chemistry, including inorganic chemistry, protein chemistry, structural chemistry and chemical bonding. Cotton was the originator of and leading authority in the field of compounds containing single and multiple bonds between metal atoms. His other principal contributions dealt with protein structure, spectroscopic studies of metal carbonyls, and the dynamic behavior of fluxional organometallic and metal carbonyl compounds.