Bob Grubbs is the Victor and Elizabeth Atkins Professor of Chemistry at the California Institute of Technology.  His main interests in organometallic chemistry and synthetic chemistry are catalysts, notably Grubbs’ catalyst for olefin metathesis and ring-opening metathesis polymerization with cyclic olefins such as norbornene.

He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2005 jointly with Yves Chauvin and Richard R Schrock “for the development of the metathesis method in organic synthesis.”