Robert Grubbs is the Victor and Elizabeth Atkins Professor of Chemistry at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California, USA, and has been a faculty member there since 1978. He studied chemistry at the University of Florida, Gainesville, then gained his PhD from Columbia University, New York, in 1968. He was an NIH Postdoctoral Fellow in chemistry at Stanford University from 1968-69, and a faculty member at Michigan State University from 1969 to 1978.

The Grubbs group discovers new catalysts and studies their fundamental chemistry and applications. For example, a family of catalysts for the interconversion of olefins, the olefin metathesis reaction, has been discovered in the Grubbs laboratory. In addition to their broad usage in academic research, these catalysts are now used commercially. He has also been involved in the translation of technology through the founding of five companies.

His awards have included the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2005, and ten ACS National Awards. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences (1989), and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1994), an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (2006), a Fellow of National Academy of Inventors (2014), a Fellow of the National Academy of Engineering (2015), and a Foreign Member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (2014) and of Great Britain’s Royal Society (2017). He has over 675 publications and over 213 patents based on his research.

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