Professor Jacobsen is the Sheldon Emery Professor of Chemistry at Harvard University, a position he has held since 2001. He received a B.S. in Chemistry from New York University, and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. From 1986 to 1988 he was a National Institutes of Health Postdoctoral Fellow at MIT. Professor Jacobsen has been a professor at Harvard University since 1993. Prior to that, he was an assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences, and he provides consulting services to a number of pharmaceutical companies. Professor Jacobsen serves on the Editorial Board of Advanced Synthesis and Catalysis, and Science of Synthesis, and on the Editorial Advisory Boards of the Journal of Organic Chemistry, Synthesis, Synlett, Organic Letters, the Journal of Combinatorial Chemistry, the Journal of Molecular Catalysis, Current Opinion in Drug Discovery & Development, and Chemistry: An Asian Journal. Professor Jacobsen's research interests are in organic chemistry, and particularly on the discovery and application of new methods for organic synthesis. Professor Jacobsen has served as chair of Cubist’s Scientific Advisory Board since July 2010.