ESOC 2021

Prof. Christophe Copéret (CCH) was trained in chemistry and chemical engineering at CPE Lyon, France, and carried out a PhD in chemistry with Prof. E.i. Negishi (Purdue University, USA – 1991-1996), where he investigated the synthesis of complex molecules via Pd-catalyzed carbonylation reactions. After a postdoctoral stay with Prof. K.B. Sharpless (Scripps), CCH was offered a research position at CNRS in 1998 and was promoted CNRS Research Director in 2008. Since 2010, CCH is Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Applied Biosciences, ETH Zürich. His scientific interest lies at the frontiers of molecular, material and surface chemistry as well as NMR spectroscopy with the aims to design molecularly-defined solid catalysts through detailed mechanistic studies and structure-activity relationships. CCH is a member of the Board of the Swiss Chemical Society and the co-Editor-in-Chief of Helvetica Chimica Acta.

Matt Francis is the Joel Hildebrand Distinguished Professor and Chemistry Department Chair at UC Berkeley. Matt received his undergraduate degree in Chemistry from Miami University in Oxford, OH in 1994. From 1994-1999 he attended graduate school at Harvard University, working in the lab of Prof. Eric Jacobsen. He then moved to UC Berkeley, where he was a Postdoctoral Fellow under the guidance of Prof. Jean Fréchet. Matt started his independent career in the UC Berkeley Chemistry Department in 2001, and has built a research program involving the development of new organic reactions for protein modification. These chemical tools have been used to prepare new biomolecular materials for diagnostic imaging, drug delivery, water treatment, and solar cell development.

Vladimir Gevorgyan received his BSc from the Kuban State University in 1978, and PhD from the Latvian Institute of Organic Synthesis in 1984. After two years of Postdoctoral research (1992-1994, JSPS- and Ciba-Geigy International Postdoctoral Fellowships) at Tohoku University, Japan, and a visiting professorship (1995) at CNR, Bologna, Italy, he joined faculty at Tohoku University (Assistant Professor, 1996; Associate Professor, 1997-1999). Vladimir Gevorgyan joined UIC as an Associate Professor in 1999. He was promoted to the rank of Full Professor in 2003, and a Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences in 2012. In 2019, Vladimir Gevorgyan moved to Texas to become a Robert A. Welch Distinguished Chair in Chemistry at the University of Texas at Dallas. He also holds a Professor position at the University of Texas Southwestern medical center.

A. Stephen K. Hashmi is Professor for Organic Chemistry at Heidelberg University and Director of the Instiute of Organic Chemistry. His Major research interest are homogeneous catalysis reactions, his group has a special interest in gold catalysis. His previous academic stations were Munich, Stanford, Berlin, Frankfurt, Vienna, Marburg and Stuttgart.

C. Oliver Kappe is Professor of Chemistry at the University of Graz (Austria) and Scientific Director of the Center of Continuous Flow Synthesis and Processsing (CC FLOW). He received his diploma (1989) and his doctoral (1992) degrees in organic chemistry from the University of Graz and after two postdoctoral stays (University of Queensland and Emory University) returned to Graz in 1996 to start his indepenent acacdemic career and was appointed Full Professor in 2011. For the past decade the focus of his research has been directed towards flow chemistry/microreaction technology, encompassing a wide variety of synthetic transformations and experimental techniques. His research group is actively involved in projects dealing with API synthesis and manufacturing, employing a number of different enabling and process intensification strategies.

Professor Steven Ley is currently a Voluntary Research Associate at the University of Cambridge. He is also a Fellow of Trinity College and was BP 1702 Professor of Chemistry for 21 years. Steve obtained his PhD from Loughborough University and afterwards carried out postdoctoral research with Leo Paquette (Ohio State University) and with Derek Barton (Imperial College). He started his career at Imperial College in 1975, , and became Head of Department there in 1989, moving to Cambridge University in 1992. In 1990 he was elected to the Royal Society (London) and was President of The Royal Society of Chemistry. Steve’s research interests are varied and span many disciplines including new synthetic methodologies, the total synthesis of natural products and the development of enabling technologies for chemical synthesis - especially in the area of flow chemistry technologies. Four spin-out companies have emerged from these research interests. Steve has published over 880 papers and has been honoured with 50 major awards including recently (since 2009).

Ben List’s research focuses on chemical synthesis and catalysis. He has contributed and pioneered fundamental concepts in organocatalysis including aminocatalysis, enamine catalysis, and asymmetric counteranion directed catalysis (ACDC). After his finding of the proline-catalyzed direct asymmetric intermolecular aldol reaction in 2000, Ben List’s group has discovered the first proline-catalyzed asymmetric Mannich reaction, novel Michael additions, and aldehyde α-alkylations. He has also contributed to a clear mechanistic understanding of enamine catalysis and established the basis for the design of new reactions and catalysts. His latest work deals with chiral anions in asymmetric catalysis. His general concept of asymmetric counteranion directed catalysis has recently found widespread use in organocatalysis, transition metal catalysis, and Lewis acid catalysis.

The research of Ben List’s group has been recognized with several awards, including the Synthesis-Synlett Journal Award (2000), the Otto-Bayer-Prize (2012), the Horst-Pracejus-Prize (2013), the Mukaiyama Award (2013), the Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award (2014), and the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz-Prize (2016). In 2018 he became an elected member of the German National Academy of Science Leopoldina.

Scott Rychnovsky is a Distinguished Professor of Chemistry at the University of California, Irvine. He received a BS degree from UC Berkeley in 1981 and a Ph. D. degree from Columbia University in 1986. After postdoctoral appointments at Harvard and Yale, he began his academic career at the University of Minnesota. He moved to UC Irvine as a full professor in 1995. He recently completed a two-year rotation as a Program Officer in the Chemistry Division at the National Science Foundation. Professor Rychnovsky’s research focuses on the synthesis and structural assignment of natural products, as well as the development of new methods for chemical synthesis. In addition to chemical synthesis projects, he has collaborated with Professor Huang at UC Irvine to developed new CID-cleavable cross-links to probe the structure of protein-protein complexes.

Matt Sigman was born in Los Angeles, California in 1970. He received a B.S. in chemistry from Sonoma State University in 1992 before obtaining his Ph.D. at Washington State University with Professor Bruce Eaton in 1996 in organometallic chemistry. He then moved to Harvard University to complete an NIH funded postdoctoral stint with Professor Eric Jacobsen. In 1999, he joined the faculty of the University of Utah where his research group has focused on the development of new synthetic methodology with an underlying interest in reaction mechanism. His research program explores the broad areas of oxidation catalysis, asymmetric catalysis, and the relationship between structure and function in complex reactions. He currently is the Peter J. Christine S. Stang Presidential Endowed Chair of Chemistry at the rank of Distinguished Professor and is the department chair.

Following a PhD at the ETHZ (with Prof.s LM Venanzi and D. Seebach, organometallic chemistry and catalysis) and a postdoc at Cornell University (with Prof. Roald Hoffmann, applied theoretical chemistry), Thomas Ward started his independent career at the University of Berne as A. Werner Fellow in 1993. He moved to the University of Neuchâtel in Fall 2000 as full professor of bioinorganic chemistry and initiated there the field of artificial metalloenzymes. After seven years spent there, he moved to the University of Basel in March 2008. He is the director of the National Center of Competence in Research entitled “Molecular Systems Engineering”. In 2016, he was awarded an advanced ERC grant to realize his DrEAM: the Directed Evolution of Artificial Metalloenzymes.

Mónica H. Pérez-Temprano obtained her BS degree in Chemistry at the University of Valladolid in 2005, and her PhD in 2011 under the supervision of Prof. Espinet and Prof. Casares. Next, she joined the research group of Prof. Sanford at the University of Michigan. In 2015, she began her independent career as Junior Group Leader at Institute of Chemical Research of Catalonia (ICIQ). At ICIQ, the Pérez-Temprano group is focused on the development of experimental knowledge-driven approaches for the rational design of transition metal-catalyzed transformations. To do so, her group develops different strategies for accessing highly reactive intermediates and using them as “knowledge building blocks” for overcoming synthetic limitations and/or investigating novel reactivity patterns.

After completing his D.Phil. in 2008 at the University of Oxford, U.K., he undertook postdoctoral work at the Max-Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces, Germany, and the ETH Zürich, Switzerland, and worked as a Group Leader at Alfama Lda in Portugal. He started his independent research career in 2013 at the University of Cambridge as a Royal Society University Research Fellow. In 2018 he was appointed University Lecturer (Tenured) and recently has been promoted to Reader (Associate Professor). Gonçalo is the recipient of two European Research Council grants; a starting grant and a proof-of-concept grant, and was awarded the Harrison–Meldola Memorial Prize in 2016 and the MedChemComm Emerging Investigator Lectureship in 2018, both from the Royal Society of Chemistry. His research group interests focus on the use of chemistry principles to tackle challenging biological problems for understanding and fight cancer.

Yoann Coquerel is a Research Director at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique or CNRS in French) working at Aix-Marseille University. He received a Ph. D. degree from Grenoble-Alpes University with Prof. Jean-Pierre Deprés in 2001 in the field of total synthesis of natural products. After a post-doctoral appointment at Florida State University, he began his academic career as a CNRS researcher in 2003 at Aix-Marseille University with Prof. Jean Rodriguez, where he received his habilitation in 2009, and he was promoted Research Director at CNRS in 2015. Dr. Coquerel’s research focuses on the development of methods for chemical synthesis and molecular chirality in a broad meaning, with significant contributions in the applications of short-lived synthetic intermediates (e.g. arynes, α-oxoketenes), in enantioselective organocatalysis, and more recently in the field of non-planar polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons.

Wim De Borggraeve is group leader of the MolDesignS research group at KU Leuven. He received his PhD in Chemistry at KU Leuven in 2002. He continued his career as a postdoctoral fellow of FWO-Vlaanderen and worked in the groups of Prof. W.D. Lubell (Université de Montréal) and C. Toniolo (Università di Padova). In 2009, he was appointed Assistant Professor (docent) at the Chemistry Department of KU Leuven. He was promoted to Associate Professor (hoofddocent) in 2012 and to Professor (hoogleraar) in 2016. Next to teaching chemistry to over 500 students each year, he does research in medicinal chemistry and synthetic method development.

Tanja Gaich received her PhD in Chemistry at the University of Vienna (2009, Prof. Dr. J. Mulzer) She then moved on as a post-doctoral research fellow to the Scripps Research Institute La Jolla CA (Prof. P. S. Baran, 2009-2010). In 2010, she started her independent career at the Leibniz University Hannover (mentorship Prof. Dr. M. Kalesse), and was funded by the "Fonds der chemischen Industrie" and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation with the "Sofja Kovalevskaja prize". Since July 2015 she is a full professor of Organic Chemistry at the University of Konstanz. Her research interests contain the total synthesis of bioactive natural products and the synthesis and design of chiroptical molecular switches.

Daniel G. Rivera is a Full Research Professor in Chemistry and Director of the Laboratory of Synthetic and Biomolecular Chemistry at the University of Havana, Cuba. He graduated in Chemistry with honors at the University of Havana in 2002 and earned the PhD (summa cum laude) in 2007 working at the Leibniz Institute of Plant Biochemistry, Germany, where he is currently Visiting Investigator. His research interests focus on the synthesis of natural products, multicomponent and catalytic reactions, macrocyclization and bioconjugation approaches and vaccine development. He is a Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Member of the Cuban Academy of Science and the current President of the Latin-American Federation of Chemical Associations.

Laurean Ilies is the team leader of the Advanced Organic Synthesis Team at the RIKEN Center for Sustainable Resource Science. His research interests include sustainable catalysis, efficient synthetic transformations, creation of molecules for materials science, and process chemistry. He moved to Japan from his native Romania in 1999, and graduated from the University of Tokyo (BS 2004, MS 2006, Ph.D. 2009, advisor: Prof. Eiichi Nakamura). He was appointed assistant professor at the University of Tokyo, School of Science in 2009, and promoted to associate professor in 2014. Since 2018, he is a team leader at RIKEN.

Prof. of RAS Leonid G. Voskressensky got his PhD from the RUDN University (Moscow) in 1999, followed by Dr.Sc in 2010 . His current position is Dean of Science of the same University. He is also a visiting lecturer at the universities of Ghent (Belgium), Dusseldorf, Giessen (Germany) and Loughborough (England) and Deputy Chief Editor of the Chemistry of Heterocyclic Compounds journal. Professor Voskressensky is the author of over 120 research articles. His research interests include chemistry of heterocyclic compounds, cascade and multicomponent reactions.

Joanna Wencel-Delord is an Associate Researcher at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), University of Strasbourg, France. Her research focuses on asymmetric catalysis, including the development of new methodologies for transition metal-catalyzed stereoselective C-H activation and synthesis of C-N axially chiral compounds. She is also interested in metal-free photoinduced C-H functionalization. She was educated in chemistry at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Chimie de Rennes, France and she received her PhD in 2010 from the University of Rennes 1, France (Dr. C. Crévisy and Dr. M. Mauduit). After postdoctoral studies with Prof. F. Glorius at the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster (Germany) and temporary assistant professor position (ATER) at the University of Strasbourg, she joined the CNRS in 2013.