Eric Jacobsen was born in New York City of Cuban parents and was raised in lower Manhattan and Queens. He graduated from New York University in 1982 with a B.S. in Chemistry. At NYU he was introduced to research by Yorke Rhodes. His Ph.D. work was done at U.C. Berkeley in the area of mechanistic organometallic chemistry under the direction of Robert Bergman. In 1986, he returned to the East Coast of the U.S. for an NIH postdoctoral fellowship with Barry Sharpless at MIT, where he participated in the early development of the asymmetric dihydroxylation reaction. In 1988, he began his independent career at the University of Illinois. He moved to Harvard University as full professor in the summer of 1993.