A Career in Catalysis: Maurice Brookhart

On the occasion of Professor Maurice Brookhart's retirement and recent acceptance of the Gabor A. Somorjai Award for Creative Research in Catalysis, we honor his numerous contributions to the fields of organometallic chemistry and catalysis. His truly interdisciplinary research has resulted in seminal contributions to polymer, synthetic, and mechanistic organometallic and organic chemistry. Detailed mechanistic investigations that have provided unparalleled understanding of these reactions have been supplemented by the development of new chemical methodology and polymerization processes. In this Account, we present some of his notable contributions toward understanding the chemistry of electrophilic transition-metal carbene complexes and agostic interactions, metal-catalyzed olefin polymerization and copolymerization reactions, and metal-mediated C-H bond activation and functionalization processes.