Russ Grimes was raised in Pennsylvania and is a B.S. Chemistry alumnus of Lafayette College He received his Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of Minnesota as a student of Professor William Lipscomb, although his thesis research was conducted at Harvard University where he was a Harvard Fellow. Following postdoctoral work at Harvard and with Professor M. F. Hawthorne at the University of California, Riverside, he was a faculty member in the Department of Chemistry from 1963 to 2003, becoming a Full Professor in 1973 and serving a term as Department Chair from 1981 to 1984. Over a 40-year period he and his students were among the pioneers in the synthesis and study of polyhedral molecular cage compounds of boron, along the way discovering metal-promoted oxidative cage fusion, tricarbon and large tetracarbon carboranes, stable triple-decker sandwich complexes (which were also the first electrically neutral triple-deckers), isolable tetra-, penta-, and hexadecker molecular sandwiches, linked multidecker complexes, polyhedral metallaboranes, and many novel clusters ranging from C2B3H7 to 14-vertex M2C4B8 systems. A major theme in their work was the development and exploration of small carborane ligands in the designed synthesis of novel transition-metal organometallic systems, especially those having electrically conducting or catalytic properties. The Grimes group together with William Hutton, in work initially reported in the Journal of the American Chemical Society in 1980 and 1981, developed the first successful 2D COSY (correlated spectroscopy) NMR technique involving a quadrupolar nucleus (11B) and in a 1984 JACS full paper detailed its use in both homonuclear 11B-11B) and heteronuclear (11B-1H) spectroscopy.

Professor Grimes was a Senior Fulbright Scholar at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, in 1974-75, a Guest Professor at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, in 1986, a Humboldt Scholar there in 1997-98, and a Visiting Scholar at the Korea Advanced Institute for Science and Technology in 1997. He received a Boron U.S.A. (BUSA) Award for Distinguished Achievements in Boron Science in 1990 and was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1981. He served as an American Chemical Society Tour Speaker on six occasions. He is the author or co-author of 240+ research publications and the books Carboranes (Academic Press, 1970, Russian translation 1974) and Carboranes Second Edition, (Elsevier, 2011). He edited the book Metal Interactions with Boron Clusters (Plenum, 1982) and is Editor-in-Chief of Inorganic Syntheses, Vol. 29 (John Wiley, 1992). He has served on the editorial board of Inorganic Chemistry and the editorial review panel of Dalton Transactions, and is a past president of the Board of Directors of Inorganic Syntheses.

The Third Edition of Carboranes was published by Elsevier in August, just 5 years following the Second Edition. The book reflects the rapid pace of development in this field, which is generating hundreds of publications each year in areas as diverse as nanomaterials, pharmacology, diagnostic and therapeutic medicine, extraction of radioactive metals from nuclear waste, catalysis, and organic synthesis. Professor Grimes was recently honored by a special issue of the Journal of Organometallic Chemistry, featuring over 40 contributed papers from international scientists in recognition of his contributions to boron chemistry throughout his 50-year career.