Maurice S. Brookhart is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Chemistry (1990 to the present) in the Department of Chemistry at the University of North Carolina.His research group is noted for its research in the general area of synthetic and mechanistic organometallic chemistry. A recent major thrust has been the development of post-metallocene catalysts based upon late transition metal complexes for olefin coordination polymerization.They carry out their mechanistic investigation of the polymerization reactions primarily by low temperature IR and NMR spectroscopies. The work provides a detailed understanding of catalyst resting states and relative intermediates.He won Willard Gibbs Award in 2010.