David A. Tirrell is the Ross McCollum-William H. Corcoran Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at the California Institute of Technology. After earning the B.S. in Chemistry at MIT in 1974, Tirrell enrolled in the Department of Polymer Science and Engineering at the University of Massachusetts, where he was awarded the Ph.D. in 1978 for work done under the supervision of Otto Vogl. After a brief stay with Takeo Saegusa at Kyoto University, Tirrell accepted an assistant professorship in the Department of Chemistry at Carnegie-Mellon University in the fall of 1978.
Tirrell returned to Amherst in 1984 and served as Director of the Materials Research Laboratory at the University of Massachusetts before moving to Caltech in 1998. He served as chairman of the Division of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at Caltech from 1999 until 2009.
Tirrell’s contributions to macromolecular chemistry have been recognized by his election to the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the Institute of Medicine, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has been awarded the Arthur C. Cope Scholar, Carl Marvel, Harrison Howe, S. C. Lind and Madison Marshall Awards of the American Chemical Society, as well as the ACS Award in Polymer Chemistry. He holds the Chancellor’s Medal of the University of Massachusetts, the G. N. Lewis Medal of the University of California Berkeley, and the degree of Doctor honoris causa from the Technical University of Eindhoven.