[4] After graduating from Clackamas High School in 1959, he spent a year in Germany where he worked as a test-driver for Volkswagen and developed a taste for German culture.

[4] Raymond then attended Northwestern University where he studied coordination chemistry and crystallography under Fred Basolo and also worked closely with James A. Ibers, earning his Ph.D. degree in 1968.

One of the first great achievements of Raymond's independent research career was the determination of the crystal structure of uranocene (di-π-(cyclooctatetraene)uranium).

[7][8] The study of iron transport systems in microbes and the coordination chemistry of siderophores is one of the longest running projects in the Raymond group.

This project is based on a fundamental understanding of coordination chemistry, in order to design ligands that are selective for and support the geometry constraints of these elements.

Recent work on this project, which led to a paper in Science,[13] has demonstrated unprecedented host–guest reaction rate accelerations reminiscent of enzyme kinetics.