Robert Knowles

Robert Knowles is a professor of chemistry at Princeton University. His group's work has focused primarily on the applications of proton-coupled electron transfer (PCET) in organic synthesis and catalysis. Knowles received a BS in chemistry from the College of William and Mary in 2003 and a PhD in synthetic organic chemistry from Caltech in 2008 for his work on natural product total synthesis. Following his doctoral work, Knowles joined Harvard University as a National Institutes of Health postdoctoral fellow, where his work focused on asymmetric catalysis and new reaction development. Knowles joined Princeton as assistant professor in the summer of 2011, and was named professor of chemistry in 2017. Knowles is the recipient of the American Chemical Society's E.J. Corey Award and Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award, a Novartis Early Career Award in Organic Chemistry, a Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, the Grammaticakis-Neumann Prize from the Swiss Chemical Society, an Amgen Young Investigator Award, an Eli Lilly Grantee Award, and an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship.