Robert Floyd Curl Jr. was an American chemist who was Pitzer–Schlumberger Professor of Natural Sciences and professor of chemistry at Rice University. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1996 for the discovery of the nanomaterial buckminsterfullerene, and hence the fullerene class of materials, along with Richard Smalley and Harold Kroto of the University of Sussex.

Rice University, formally William Marsh Rice University, is a private research university in Houston, Texas, United States. It sits on a 300-acre campus adjacent to the Houston Museum District and the Texas Medical Center.