Robert H. Crabtree


Robert Howard Crabtree is a British-American chemist. He is serving as Whitehead Professor of Chemistry at Yale University in the United States. He is a naturalised citizen of the United States. Crabtree is particularly known for his work on "Crabtree's catalyst" for hydrogenations, and his textbook on organometallic chemistry.

Education

Robert Howard Crabtree studied at Brighton College, and earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Oxford where he was a student at New College, Oxford in 1970, studying under Malcolm Green. He received his PhD from the University of Sussex in 1973, supervised by Joseph Chatt.

Career and research

After his PhD, he was a postdoctoral researcher with Hugh Felkin at the Institut de Chimie des Substances Naturelles at Gif-sur-Yvette, near Paris. He was a postdoctoral fellow and then attaché de recherche. At the end of that time he was chargé de recherche. In 1977 Crabtree took an assistant professorship in Inorganic Chemistry at Yale University. He served as associate professor from 1982 to 1985, and as full professor from 1985 until the present.

Editorial positions and published works