Sir Harold (Harry) Kroto was one of three recipients of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1996, the same year that he was knighted for his contributions to chemistry. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of London, and holds an emeritus professorship at the University of Sussex in Brighton, United Kingdom.

He is currently on the faculty at Florida State University, where he started an educational initiative known as the Global Educational Outreach for Science, Engineer¬ing, and Technology, or GEOSET (www.geoset.info and www.geoset.fsu.edu). This seeks to exploit the revolutionary creative dynamics (the GooYouWikiWorld) of the Internet to improve the general level of science teaching worldwide. He obtained a first class BSc honors degree in chemistry (1961) and a PhD, in molecular spectroscopy (1964) at the University of Sheffield in South Yorkshire, United Kingdom. After a post-doctoral position at the National Research Council in Ottawa from 1964 to 1966, he spent a year at the Murray Hill Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, and in 1967 he started his academic career at the University of Sussex.

In 1970 his team conducted laboratory and radio astronomy studies on long linear carbon chain molecules, and discovered that these molecules existed in interstellar space. In 1985, he worked with Richard Smalley and Robert Curl at Rice Univer¬sity in Texas, performing laboratory experiments which simulated the chemical reactions in the atmosphere of red giants, and uncovered the existence of C60 Buckminsterfullerene, a new form of carbon. Smalley, Curl, and Kroto received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work. In 1995, he inaugurated the Vega Science Trust (www.vega.org.uk) to create science films of sufficiently high quality for network television broadcast.

He holds 29 honorary degrees from universities in the UK and abroad, as well as many scientific awards. From 2004 he has been on the Board of Scientific Governors at Scripps Institute. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2007. His research program at Florida State University focuses on the range of molecular constituents of carbon vapor; the devel¬opment of novel 2D arrays and associated open framework systems of metal cluster/organic linkers as well as peptides; the stabilization of small fullerenes; and carbon nanotube based devices.