Geoffrey W. Coates was born in Evansville, Indiana in 1966. He obtained a B.A. degree in chemistry from Wabash College in 1989 and a Ph.D. in organic chemistry from Stanford University in 1994. His thesis work, under the direction of Robert M. Waymouth,
investigated the stereoselectivity of metallocene-based Ziegler-Natta
catalysts. Following his doctoral studies, he was an Arthur Amos Noyes
and NSF Postdoctoral Fellow with Robert H. Grubbs at the California Institute of Technology.
During the summer of 1997, he
joined the faculty of Cornell University as an Assistant Professor of
Chemistry. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 2001 and Professor
in 2002, and is currently Associate Chair of his Department. He was an
Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow, and has received awards from the NSF (CAREER), MIT Technology Review Magazine (TR 100 Award), Research Corporation (Innovation Award), Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation (Young Investigator Award), David and Lucile Packard Foundation (Fellowship in Science and Engineering), ACS
(A. C. Cope Scholar, A. K. Doolittle, and Akron Section Awards), and
Dreyfus Foundation (Camille and Henry Dreyfus New Faculty and Camille
Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Awards). In 2005, he received a Special
Creativity Award from the NSF.
His main research interests are
the design, synthesis, characterization, and applications of polymers,
with an emphasis on catalytic transformations and the control of
stereochemistry.