Education
Jacobsen attended New York University for his undergraduate studies and the University of California at Berkeley for graduate school, earning his Doctor of Philosophy in 1986 under the tutelage of Robert G. Bergman.
Jacobsen attended New York University for his undergraduate studies and the University of California at Berkeley for graduate school, earning his Doctor of Philosophy in 1986 under the tutelage of Robert G. Bergman.
He is a prominent figure in the field of organic chemistry and is best known for the development of the Jacobsen epoxidation and other work in selective catalysis. He subsequently joined the laboratory of Barry Sharpless, then of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as an National Institutes of Health Postdoctoral Fellow. He was a faculty member at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign before relocating to Harvard in 1993.
Jacobsen has developed catalysts for asymmetric epoxidation, hydrolytic kinetic resolution and desymmetrization of epoxides, asymmetric pericyclic reactions, and asymmetric additions to imines.