Gregory S. Girolami

Gregory Scott Girolami
Alma mater	University of Texas at Austin, University of California at Berkeley
Scientific career
Fields	Chemistry
Institutions	University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign
Doctoral advisor	Richard A. Andersen
Other academic advisors	Geoffrey Wilkinson
Doctoral students	Cheon Jinwoo, Wenbin Lin, Julia L. Brumaghim, Timothy H. Warren
Website	www.chemistry.illinois.edu/faculty/Gregory_Girolami.html

Gregory S. Girolami is the William H. and Janet G. Lycan Professor of Chemistry at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research focuses on the synthesis, properties, and reactivity of new inorganic, organometallic, and solid state species. Girolami is also co-founder of a start-up company, Tiptek LLC, which manufactures ultrasharp probe tips for use in scanning tunneling microscopy and for fault diagnosis and testing of integrated circuits.

Education and career

Girolami received his B.S. degrees in chemistry and physics from the University of Texas at Austin and his Ph.D. degree from the University of California, Berkeley with Richard A. Andersen. Thereafter, he was a NATO postdoctoral fellow with Sir Geoffrey Wilkinson at Imperial College of Science and Technology, and joined the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign faculty in 1983. He has served as Head of the Chemistry Department twice, first from 2000 until 2005 and again from 2013 to 2016.

Awards

Girolami has received numerous awards for his research, including the Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award, a Sloan Foundation Fellowship, a Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, and a University Scholar Award. He is the author of several popular and well-regarded textbooks, and is regularly named to the list of excellent teachers on the University of Illinois campus. He has been elected a Fellow of several academies, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Royal Society of Chemistry, and the American Chemical Society.

Research

Girolami's research primarily involves the synthesis, properties, and reactivity of new inorganic, organometallic, and solid state species. Much of the research in his group relates to one of four areas: mechanistic studies of organometallic reactions such as the activation of saturated alkanes, the chemical vapor deposition of thin films from "designed" molecular precursors, the chemistry of the actinides, and the synthesis of new "molecule-based" magnetic materials

In 1989 Girolami and Morse showed that [Zr(CH
₃)
₆]²⁻
was trigonal prismatic as indicated by X-ray crystallography. They accurately predicted that other d⁰ ML₆ species such as [Nb(CH
₃)
₆]⁻
, [Ta(CH
₃)
₆]⁻
, and W(CH₃)₆ would also prove to be trigonal prismatic.

Other Heads, Department of Chemistry, University of Illinois

Head	Years of Service	Years
A. P. S. Stewart	1868–1874	6
Henry A. Weber	1874–1882	8
William McMurtrie	1882–1888	6
J. C. Jackson	1888	1
Arthur W. Palmer	1889–1904	15
Harry S. Grindley	1904–1907	3
William A. Noyes	1907–1926	19
Roger Adams	1926–1954	28
Herbert E. Carter	1954–1967	13
Herbert S. Gutowsky	1967–1983	16
Larry R. Faulkner	1984–1989	5
Gary B. Schuster	1989–1994	5
Paul W. Bohn	1995–1999	5
Steven C. Zimmerman	1999–2000	1
Gregory S. Girolami	2000–2005	5
Steven C. Zimmerman	2005-2013	8
Gregory S. Girolami	2013-2016	4
Martin Gruebele	2017-