Paul Chirik
Paul was born in Philadelphia and grew up in Doylestown, PA. In 1995, he graduated magna cum laude with a B.S. in Chemistry from Virginia Tech under advisor Joseph Merola. Paul then earned his Ph.D. with John Bercaw at Caltech in 2000 studying the mechanism of metallocene-catalyzed olefin polymerization and hydrometallation chemistry.
Following a postdoc with Christopher Cummins at MIT, Paul joined the faculty at Cornell University in 2001 as assistant professor. In 2006, he was promoted to associate professor, and in 2009 he was named the Peter J. W. DeBye Professor of Chemistry. In 2011, he moved to Princeton University as the Edwards S. Sanford Professor of Chemistry.
Among Paul’s many awards and honors are a CAREER award, a Packard fellowship, an Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award, the Linus Pauling medal, the Rylander Award from BASF and, the Gabor Somorjai Award for Creative Research in Catalysis. Paul joined CHASE in 2025.
