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 CarolinaThe University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is a public research university located in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, United States...
.
Brookhart received his
Bachelor of ScienceA Bachelor of Science is an undergraduate academic degree awarded for completed courses that generally last three to five years .-Australia:In Australia, the BSc is a 3 year degree, offered from 1st year on...
from
Johns Hopkins UniversityThe Johns Hopkins University, commonly referred to as Johns Hopkins, JHU, or simply Hopkins, is a private research university based in Baltimore, Maryland, United States...
in 1964. He received his
Ph.D.A Ph.D. is a Doctor of Philosophy, an academic degree.Ph.D. may also refer to:* Ph.D. , a 1980s British group*Piled Higher and Deeper, a web comic strip*PhD: Phantasy Degree, a Korean comic series* PhD Docbook renderer, an XML renderer...
in 1968 from the
University of California, Los AngelesThe University of California, Los Angeles is a public research university located in the Westwood neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, USA. It was founded in 1919 as the "Southern Branch" of the University of California and is the second oldest of the ten campuses...
, in
physical organic chemistryPhysical organic chemistry is the study of the interrelationships between structure and reactivity in organic molecules. It can be seen as the study of organic chemistry using tools of physical chemistry such as chemical equilibrium, chemical kinetics, thermochemistry, and quantum chemistry...
where his thesis advisor was
Saul WinsteinSaul Winstein was the Canadian chemist who discovered the Winstein reaction, in which he argued a non-classical cation was needed to explain the stability of the norbornyl cation. This fueled a debate with Herbert C. Brown over the existence of delocalized cations such as this. Richard F...
. After an
NSFThe National Science Foundation is a United States government agency that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National Institutes of Health...
postdoctoral
fellowA fellow in the broadest sense is someone who is an equal or a comrade. The term fellow is also used to describe a person, particularly by those in the upper social classes. It is most often used in an academic context: a fellow is often part of an elite group of learned people who are awarded...
ship 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 chemistryOrganometallic chemistry is the study of chemical compounds containing bonds between carbon and a metal. Since many compounds without such bonds are chemically similar, an alternative may be compounds containing metal-element bonds of a largely covalent character...
. A recent major thrust has been the development of
post-metallocene catalystA post-metallocene catalyst is a kind of catalyst for olefin polymerization. "Post-metallocene" refers to the generation of catalysts following Kaminsky catalysts, which are metallocene catalysts discovered in 1980 by Walter Kaminsky, and have been highly publicized in the olefin polymerization...
s based upon late transition metal complexes for olefin
coordination polymerizationCoordination polymerization is a form of addition polymerization in which monomer adds to a growing macromolecule through an organometallic active center...
. 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 SciencesThe National Academy of Sciences is a corporation in the United States whose members serve pro bono as "advisers to the nation on science, engineering, and medicine." As a national academy, new members of the organization are elected annually by current members, based on their distinguished and...
.