Top Chem Prof May Move Downstream

Eric N. Jacobsen, a leading chemistry professor, is leaving Harvard for MIT, according to the head of MIT’s chemistry department.

Timothy M. Swager, the department head, said on Saturday that Jacobsen formally accepted MIT’s offer on Oct. 10 and will be leaving Harvard at the end of the academic year to become the Firmenich professor of chemistry at MIT. Jacobsen, however, told The Crimson in an e-mail that he had yet to make a final decision on where he would work next year. He declined to comment further.

If Jacobsen does move down Mass. Ave to MIT, he will join what Swager called the institute’s “dream team” of reaction development researchers.

“We have quite a team and now we have Eric Jacobsen, so we really have in reaction development a team of people unparalleled in the history of chemistry, in my view,” Swager said in a telephone interview. The team now includes organic chemists Stephen L. Buchwald, Gregory C. Fu, Rick L. Danheiser, Timothy F. Jamison, and Mohammad Movassaghi, and inorganic chemists Richard R. Schrock, Christopher C. Cummins, and Jonas Peters.

Jacobsen, 47, came to Harvard as a professor in 1993. In addition to teaching the introductory organic chemistry course Chemistry 17 for many years, he has become a prominent voice in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Jacobsen was one of 13 professors on the faculty advisory committee to the presidential search last year and one of the three professors who drafted the general education legislation that the Faculty approved last spring. He also currently sits on the 18-member governing board of the FAS, the Faculty Council.

Swager said that Jacobsen will be a major contributor to a new research center at MIT, the MIT-Novartis Center for Continuous Manufacturing, which is being funded by $65 million from Novartis Pharmaceuticals, a health care products company.

Calling the center “the first of its kind,” Swager said he believed the MIT-Novartis Center will be “transformational in how people look at synthetic chemistry.”

“It will almost be like an assembly line to create pharmaceuticals,” he said. “It’s a very challenging goal and will require new ways of looking at synthetic chemistry. Eric is going to be one of the central figures.”

Jacobsen has had a long-term relationship with MIT, according to Swager.

“Eric’s a chemist our department has been interested in for years, as any other department in the country has,” Swager said. “Eric and many of the members of our faculty have been close friends for years.”

He added that MIT and Harvard’s chemistry departments are on very good terms and that collaboration would continue between the two scientific giants.

“He’s been a wonderful teacher at Harvard,” Swager said of Jacobsen. “I feel bad about Harvard’s loss, but I think our two departments have a lot of friendships between them. Our departments will continue to have great scholarly exchanges over the years.”

Joyce C. Chang ’08, a biochemical sciences concentrator in Leverett House who took Jacobsen’s Chemistry 17, said that a graduate student who works in Jacobsen’s lab told her early last month that the professor was heading to MIT.

“I’m pretty upset about him leaving,” Chang said. “I think he’s a wonderful teacher....He brought me back to chemistry.”

Several chemistry graduate students and professors contacted for this article, including department chair Andrew G. Myers, declined to comment. Dean of the Faculty Michael D. Smith said in an e-mail that he had spoken with Jacobsen, but would not comment further.

If Jacobsen does leave Harvard for MIT, it would be latest chapter in a long history of faculty moves between the two schools. In recent years, Harvard has attracted many top scholars from MIT, including behavioral economist Sendhil Mullainathan in 2004 and psychologists Elizabeth Spelke ’71 in 2001 and Steven Pinker in 2003. Harvard’s previous president, Lawrence H. Summers, came to Harvard as an economics professor from MIT, becoming at age 28 one of the youngest tenured professors in the University’s history.

—Staff writer Angela A. Sun can be reached at asun@fas.harvard.edu.