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Jeremy Knowles

Jeremy Randall Knowles, CBE (1935-) is a Professor of Chemistry at Harvard University, was Dean of the Harvard University Faculty of Arts and Sciences from 1991 to 2002. He joined Harvard in 1974, received many awards for his research, and has remained at Harvard ever since, leaving the faculty for a decade to serve as Dean.

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In 2006, he was selected by incoming interim president Derek Bok to return to his position as Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on an interim basis, replacing William C. Kirby, who was ousted by now former president Lawrence Summers. [1]

Life and work

Knowles was born in England in 1935, educated at Magdalen College School (Oxford) and Balliol College, Oxford (BA 1959, DPhil 1961). He was a Pilot Officer in the Royal Air Force. He later became Fellow and Tutor at Wadham College, Oxford, took a post-doctoral fellowship at California Institute of Technology , and was a visiting professor at Yale. He then became a Sloan visiting professor at Harvard, and then a permanent professor there.

Knowles's research has been on the boundary of chemistry and biochemistry, and has concerned the rate and specificity of enzyme catalysis and the evolution of protein function. He is the author of more than 250 research papers, and has advised more than 50 Ph.D. recipients at Oxford and at Harvard.

Knowles married Jane Sheldon Davis in 1960, and they have three sons.

Awards and honors

Knowles is a Fellow of the Royal Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a Foreign Associate of the National Academy of Sciences. Among his awards are the Royal Society of Chemistry's Charmian Medal, the Bader Award, the Repligen Award, the Prelog Medal, the Robert A. Welch Award in Chemistry, the American Chemical Society's Arthur Cope Scholar Award, and the Nakanishi Prize. He was awarded the Davy Medal of the Royal Society, and is an Honorary Fellow of Balliol College and of Wadham College, Oxford. He holds honorary degrees from the University of Edinburgh and the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule in Zürich. He was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the Queen's Birthday Honours of 1993. He was elected one of nine Trustees of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in 1998.