Ei-ichi Negishi, H. C. Brown Distinguished Professor of Chemistry, Purdue University, grew up in Japan and received his Bachelor's degree from the University of Tokyo in 1958. After he obtained his Ph.D. degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1963, he joined Professor H. C. Brown's Laboratories at Purdue as a Postdoctoral Associate in 1966 and was appointed Assistant to Professor Brown in 1968. Negishi went to Syracuse University as Assistant Professor in 1972 and began his life-long investigations of transition metal-catalyzed organometallic reactions for organic synthesis. He was promoted to Associate Professor at Syracuse University in 1976 and invited back to Purdue University as Full Professor in 1979. In 1999 he was appointed the inaugural H. C. Brown Distinguished Professor of Chemistry.

Professor Negishi has received various awards, with the most representative being the 1996 Chemical Society of Japan Award, the 1998 ACS Award in Organometallic Chemistry, 1998–2001 Alexander von Humboldt Senior Researcher Award, Germany, 2000 Sir Edward Frankland Prize, Royal Society of Chemistry, UK, the 2007 Yamada-Koga Prize, Japan, the 2010 ACS Award for Creative Work in Synthetic Organic Chemistry, 2010 Japanese Order of Culture, and the 2010 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.