Eric N. Jacobsen (born February 22, 1960. in New York City, New York) is the Sheldon Emery Professor of Chemistry and 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. Jacobsen attended New York University for his undergraduate studies and the University of California, Berkeley for graduate school, earning his PhD in 1986 under the tutelage of Robert G. Bergman. He subsequently joined the laboratory of Barry Sharpless, then of MIT, as an NIH Postdoctoral Fellow. He was a faculty member at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign before relocating to Harvard in 1993.