Robert Crabtree

Born in London in 1948, Robert Crabtree’s parents were in show business, but they enjoined 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, and his mother was in the dance troop for the films. Professor Crabtree attended Brighton College, then New College at Oxford (B.A.), then the University of Sussex (D. Phil. and D.Sc.). He was a long-range-target rifle shot, being British champion at 1,100 yards in the national meeting at Bisley. At Yale since 1977, he is Whitehead Research Professor Emeritus in 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 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. Recently, in collaboration with Gary Brudvig, he developed water oxidation and C-H bond conversion to C-OH with iridium catalysts in connection with the problem of green catalysis and alternative energy production. He has been American Chemical Society (ACS) and Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) organometallic chemistry awardee, Baylor medallist, Dow, Williams and Mond lecturer, Centenary awardee, has chaired the ACS Inorganic Division, and is the author of an organometallic textbook now in its seventh edition, with the eighth in preparation. He is a Fellow of the American and Royal Chemical Societies, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Royal Society, as well as a member of the National Academy of Sciences.