Professor Erik J Sorensen
Erik J. Sorensen is the Arthur Allan Patchett Professor in Organic Chemistry in the Department of Chemistry at Princeton University. He received his Ph. D. degree in Chemistry in 1995 from the University of California, San Diego under the direction of Prof. K. C. Nicolaou. From 1995-1997, he was a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Prof. Samuel Danishefsky at The Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. In 1997, he joined the faculty in the Department of Chemistry at The Scripps Research Institute and the Skaggs Institute for Chemical Biology and achieved the rank of Associate Professor in 2001. In 2003, he moved to Princeton University, where he is a Professor in the Department of Chemistry. Erik's laboratory pursues concepts and methods that have the potential to advance the field of complex chemical synthesis. They are especially interested in the problem of constructing molecular complexity rapidly from abundant compounds, questions concerning the structural origins of architecturally unique natural products, and evaluating hypotheses about the chemical basis of the biological activities of natural products and non-natural molecules. For his achievements in chemical research and education, Erik received a Beckman Young Investigator Award, a Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, the Pfizer Global Research Award for Excellence in Organic Chemistry, the AstraZeneca Award for Excellence in Chemistry, the Lilly Grantee Award, the Bristol-Myers Squibb Unrestricted Grant in Synthetic Organic Chemistry, and A Focused Giving Award from Johnson & Johnson. In 2001, he was a Woodward Scholar at Harvard University. In 2007, he was the Givaudan/Karrer Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Zürich. In 2009, he received the Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award from the American Chemical Society.
Abstract
Rapid formation of molecular complexity in natural product synthesis
