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. From 1958-1966, while working as a Research Chemist at Teijin, Ltd., Japan, Negishi spent 3 years (1960-1963) as a Fulbright-Smith-Mund Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania and obtained his Ph.D. in Chemistry. In 1966, he joined Professor H. C. Brown's Laboratories at Purdue as a Postdoctoral Associate 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.

Ei-ichi Negishi 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. He has received various awards, with the most representative being 1987 J.S. Guggenheim Fellowship, 1996 Chemical Society of Japan Award, 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, 2007 Yamada-Koga Prize, Japan, 2010 ACS Award for Creative Work in Synthetic Organic Chemistry, 2010 Japanese Order of Culture, 2010 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 2010 UK Royal Society of Chemistry Honorary Fellowship Award, 2011 Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and 2014 elected into the National Academy of Sciences as a Foreign Associate