Eric N. Jacobsen (born February 22, 1960, in New York City, New York) is the Sheldon Emery Professor of Chemistry and former chair of the department of chemistry and chemical biology at Harvard University.
He is a prominent figure in the field of organic chemistry and is best known for the development of the Jacobsen epoxidation and other work in selective catalysis.
He attended the University of California, Berkeley for graduate school, earning his Ph.D. in 1986 under the tutelage of Robert G. Bergman.
He subsequently joined the laboratory of Barry Sharpless, then at MIT, as an NIH Postdoctoral Fellow.
He began his independent career as an assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1988.