Robert Crabtree

Born in London in 1948, Robert Crabtree’s parents were in show business, but they encouraged him to pick any other career because of the uncertainty of their own. His father, Arthur, was a cinematographer for Alfred Hitchcock during the 1930s, when his mother was in the dance troupe for the studio’s films. He attended Brighton College, then New College at Oxford (B.A.), then the University of Sussex (D.Phil. and D.Sc.). At Oxford, he was a long-range target-rifle shot, being British champion at 1,100 yards in the national meeting. He then became an attaché de recherche at the National Center for Scientific Research at Gif-sur-Yvette (France) for four years.

At Yale since 1977, he is the Conkey P. Whitehead Professor Emeritus of Chemistry since retiring in 2021. In early work, he reversed homogeneous catalytic alkene hydrogenation to bring about alkane dehydrogenation. The so-called Crabtree catalyst has proved useful for certain challenging hydrogenations and has therefore seen broad academic and industrial use. This was followed by work on complexation of molecular hydrogen to metals and finding a new type of hydrogen bonding that he called dihydrogen bonding. In close collaboration with Yale colleague Gary Brudvig, he developed iridium catalysts for water oxidation and C-H bond conversion to C-OH in connection with the problems of catalysis for alternative energy production and for organic synthesis.

Professor Crabtree has been American Chemical Society (ACS) and Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) organometallic chemistry awardee, Baylor medallist, Dow, Williams and Mond lecturer, Centenary awardee; he has chaired the ACS Inorganic Division, and is the author of an organometallic chemistry textbook now in its seventh edition. Yale’s Department of Chemistry has named a lecture series after him. He is a winner of the Franco-American Chemistry Prize and a Fellow of the American Chemical Society, the Royal Society of Chemistry, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Society, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.