Eric Jacobsen Receives Ojima Distinguished Lectureship Award in Chemistry

Stony Brook University's Department of Chemistry, the Institute of Chemical Biology and Drug Discovery (ICB&DD) and the College of Arts and Sciences recently hosted the 2026 Ojima Distinguished Lectureship Award in Chemistry. Now in its fifth year, this year's Award honored Eric Jacobsen, Sheldon Emery Professor of Chemistry at Harvard University.

Established in 2020 to commemorate Distinguished Professor Iwao Ojima's 75th birthday, the Ojima Distinguished Lectureship Award is based on an endowment from the Ojima family to help ensure that eminent scholars such as Jacobsen can continue to enrich the Department of Chemistry and Stony Brook University. Past recipients of this award include the inaugural recipient, Makoto Fujita, University of Tokyo, in 2022; John F. Hartwig, University of California, Berkeley, in 2023; Hiroaki Suga, University of Tokyo, in 2024; and Veronique Gouverneur, University of Oxford, in 2025.

Stanislaus Wong, distinguished professor and chair of the Department of Chemistry, provided opening remarks, thanking Ojima and his wife, Yoko Ojima, for their generosity as well as their outstanding philanthropic work throughout the years. Wong expressed great appreciation for Ojima and added that the Department of Chemistry is truly honored to have him as one of their faculty, not only as a valued and esteemed mentor to their junior colleagues but also as an insightful, illustrious, and well-respected colleague. "Professor Ojima has been and always will be an incomparable asset to the Department and to the University," Wong said.

David Wrobel, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, gave special remarks thanking Jacobsen for enlightening the chemical science community with his award lecture, as a world leader in the discovery and application of catalytic reactions for organic synthesis. He offered special recognition to Ojima and his wife Yoko for their continuous support and philanthropy throughout more than 40 years of their tenure at Stony Brook University.

Upon receiving the award plaque from Ojima, Jacobsen gave an inspiring Award lecture, "Seeking Generality and Cooperativity in Asymmetric Catalysis."

Jacobsen is a world leader in the discovery and application of catalytic reactions for organic synthesis. In 1990, he solved a long-standing problem in chemistry with the discovery of the first useful method for asymmetric epoxidation of unfunctionalized olefins. This reaction, implemented through his discovery of simple yet effective chiral manganese catalysts, has proven useful and reliable on both laboratory and industrial scale. Jacobsen's research is dedicated to discovering useful catalytic reactions, and to applying state-of-the art mechanistic and computational techniques to the analysis of those reactions. Several catalysts developed in his labs have found widespread application in industry and academia. Jacobsen's mechanistic analyses of these systems have helped uncover general principles for catalyst design, including electronic tuning of selectivity, cooperative homo- and hetero-bimetallic catalysis, privileged catalysis, hydrogen-bond donor asymmetric catalysis, and anion-binding catalysis.

Jacobsen received his BS in Chemistry from New York University and his PhD from the University of California, Berkely. He did his postdoctoral research at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as an NIH postdoctoral fellow. He joined the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1988, then moved to Harvard University to assume the Sheldon Emery Professor of Chemistry chair in 1993 and has been promoting world-leading research and education since. Jacobsen is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has received numerous awards, including ACS Roger Adams Award in Chemistry, the Welch Award in Chemistry and the ACS Arthur C. Cope Award, among many others.

Ojima received his BS, MS and PhD degrees from The University of Tokyo, Japan. He was a senior research fellow at the Sagami Institute of Chemical Research until 1983, at which time he joined the Department of Chemistry as an associate professor. In 1984 he was appointed professor, then leading professor in 1991 and distinguished professor in 1995. Ojima was the department chair from 1997 to 2003 and has been serving as the founding director for the Institute of Chemical Biology and Drug Discovery since 2003, and as president of the Stony Brook University chapter of the National Academy of Inventors since 2016.

Ojima has received many prestigious honors, including national awards in four different disciplines in chemistry from the American Chemical Society, including theArthur C. Cope Scholar Award, E. B. Hershberg Award, ACS Award for Creative Work in Fluorine Chemistry and Ernest Guenther Award in the Chemistry of Natural Products. He was inducted into the Medicinal Chemistry Hall of Fame of the American Chemical Society, received the Chemical Society of Japan Award, and Outstanding Inventor Award from the Research Foundation of the State University of New York. Ojima is an elected fellow of the J.S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, American Association for the Advancement of Science, New York Academy of Sciences, American Chemical Society, National Academy of Inventors and European Academy of Sciences.