Professor Girolami received his B.S. degrees in chemistry and physics from the University of Texas at Austin and his Ph.D. degree from the University of California at Berkeley. Thereafter, he was a NATO postdoctoral fellow with Sir Geoffrey Wilkinson at Imperial College of Science and Technology, and joined the Illinois faculty in 1983.

We are primarily interested in the synthesis, properties, and reactivity of new inorganic, organometallic, and solid state species. Much of our research relates to one of four areas: mechanistic studies of organometallic reactions such as the activation of alkanes, the synthesis of new "molecule-based" magnetic materials, the chemical vapor deposition of thin films from "designed" molecular precursors, and the design of an artificial photosynthetic center.