Professor Eric V. Anslyn received his BS in chemistry from the California State University Northridge in 1982, and performed his thesis studies under the direction of Dr Robert Grubbs at the California Institute of Technology in the area of orgaometallic chemistry, receiving a PhD in 1987. He was then an NSF post-doctoral fellow at Columbia University, working with the late Ronald Breslow in the area of biomimetric chemistry. From there, he started as an assistant professor of chemistry at the University of Texas, Austin, in 1989. He rose through the ranks to hold the Welch Regents Chair of Chemistry, and is a University Distinguished Teaching Professor as well as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor. He has received numerous awards, including the Izatt Christiansen Award for Macrocyclic and Supramolecular Chemistry, the Czarnik Award for Molecular Sensing, the Edward Lette Award, the Cope Scholar Award, and the James Flack Norris Award in Physical Organic Chemistry, the latter three being from the American Chemical Society.
Professor Anslyn’s research is broadly in the areas of physical organic chemistry and supramolecular chemistry with a specialization on molecular sensing, mechanistic organic chemistry studies, and most recently soft-materials and sequence defined polymers. He is a co-author of the graduate level textbook entitled “Modern Physical Organic Chemistry”.