William B. Tolman

William B. Tolman is a chemist whose research encompasses synthetic bioinorganic and organometallic/polymer subfields, key goals being to gain a fundamental understanding of the copper-containing active sites of enzymes of biological and environmental importance and to develop catalysts for converting biomass feedstocks to sustainable plastics.

He obtained a B.S. degree from Wesleyan University, CT, in 1983 and a Ph.D. in 1987 from the University of California, Berkeley, and was a postdoctoral fellow from 1987-1990 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

He was appointed as Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Minnesota in 1990, and rose through the ranks there to Distinguished McKnight University Professor. He served as Chair of the Department of Chemistry (2009-2016) and is a member of the NSF Center for Sustainable Polymers. He began his current position at Washington University in St. Louis on January 1, 2018.

Among the honors he has received are the Searle Scholars, NSF National Young Investigator, Camille & Henry Dreyfus Foundation Teacher-Scholar, and Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Awards, the Buck-Whitney Medal from the American Chemical Society, a Research Award from the Humboldt Foundation, and the ACS Award for Distinguished Service in the Advancement of Inorganic Chemistry (2017).

He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Chemical Society (ACS). He served as Associate Editor (2009-2012) and now as Editor-in-Chief of the ACS journal Inorganic Chemistry (2013-present).