Patrick Holland pursued doctoral training at the University of California at Berkeley with Robert Bergman and Richard Andersen and postdoctoral training with William Tolman at the University of Minnesota. As a faculty member at the University of Rochester, he began his independent research in 2000 by focusing on the study of three-coordinate Fe-Co complexes. Since then, his research group has addressed Fe-N-2 chemistry, reactive metal-ligand multiple bonds, engineered metalloproteins, redox-active ligands, solar H-2 production, and the mechanisms of organometallic transformations at base-metal complexes. In 2013, he moved to Yale University, where he is a professor of chemistry.