Invited Speakers

All lectures in the programme were by invitation, and comprised of a mixture of main keynote lectures and supporting lectures, in a single session format. We would like to thank the speakers for their contribution in making the symposium a success.

This page contains biographies of the invited speakers at the 20th International Symposium: Synthesis in Organic Chemistry.

Varinder K Aggarwal

Varinder K Aggarwal was born in India in 1961 and emigrated to the United Kingdom in 1963. He received his B.A. (1983) and Ph.D. (1986) from Cambridge University, studying with Dr Stuart Warren. He then carried out postdoctoral work with Professor Gilbert Stork at Columbia University, NY (1986-1988) before returning to a lectureship at Bath University and in 1991 moved to Sheffield University, where in 1997, he was promoted to Professor of Organic Chemistry. In 2000, he moved to the University of Bristol to take up the Chair of Synthetic Chemistry.

Margaret Brimble

Margaret Brimble holds the Chair of Organic and Medicinal Chemistry at the University of Auckland. She has been awarded the NZIC Easterfield Medal and HortResearch Prize, the NZ Royal Society Hamilton Prize and James Cook Research Fellowship, the Federation of Asian Chemical Societies Distinguished Young Chemist Award and the Novartis chemistry lectureship. Currently she is President of the International Society of Heterocyclic Chemistry.

Kay M Brummond

Kay M. Brummond has contributed pioneering work in developing new methods for synthesizing organic compounds of importance to drug discovery and medicinal chemistry, in particular her discoveries in transition-metal-catalyzed reactions of allenes.

The University of Nebraska awarded Brummond her bachelor's degree, and Pennsylvania State University her Ph.D. After coming to the University of Pittsburgh in 2001 and making an impact on the school, she was named a full professor of chemistry in November 2006.

Brummond has been the recipient of honors including the Chancellor's Distinguished Research Award from the University of Pittsburgh, the 2006 ACS Akron Section Award, the Carnegie Science Center Emerging Female Scientist Award, and the Johnson & Johnson Focused Giving Award. She has served as Chair of the Gordon Research Conference on Organic Reactions and Processes, guest editor of Tetrahedron, is a member of the Corporation of Organic Synthesis, Inc., NIH Synthetic and Biological Chemistry Study Section A and is Vice-Chair of the Center of Excellence for Chemical Methodologies and Library Synthesis where she is also a project leader.

 

Stephen G Davies

Professor Steve Davies is the Waynflete Professor of Chemistry and Chairman of Chemistry at Oxford.  Professor Davies' research interests involve all aspects of stereochemistry including stereoselective organometallic chemistry, medicinal and combinatorial synthesis, the development of low molecular weight organic chiral auxiliaries and enantiorecognition phenomena, which have resulted in over 400 publications.  Professor Davies is Editor in Chief of Tetrahedron Asymmetry and the Founder of Oxford Asymmetry International plc and Vastox plc, both spin-out companies from Oxford University.

Jef K De Brabander

Jef K. De Brabander is a native of Belgium where he pursued his undergraduate and graduate studies at the University of Gent. Following postdoctoral studies with the late Wolfgang Oppolzer at the University of Geneva and Paul Wender at Stanford University, he began his independent career as a junior faculty member at the University of Geneva. After one year, he was recruited to the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas, where he was promoted to Full Professor in 2007. Jef De Brabander was an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellow from 2001-2003, and is serving on the SAB of Reata Pharmaceuticals, a company he co-founded. 

P Andrew Evans

P. Andrew Evans is currently the Heath Harrison Chair of Organic Chemistry in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Liverpool.  He began his independent career at the University of Delaware in 1993 and was rapidly promoted to Professor in 2000.  In 2001 he moved to Indiana University, before recently moving back to the United Kingdom in 2006 to assume his current position.

Ian Fleming

Ian Fleming was an undergraduate (1956-1959), graduate student (1959-1962), a Research Fellow and Fellow, in Pembroke College, Cambridge, obtaining his PhD supervised by Dr John Harley-Mason. Except for a postdoctoral year (1963-1964) at Harvard with Professor R. B. Woodward, and four sabbatical visits in North America, he has spent his entire academic career in Cambridge, where he is now an Emeritus Professor of Chemistry. He was awarded the Tilden lectureship of the Royal Society of Chemistry in 1981 and their Prize for Organic Synthesis in 1983, and in 1993 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.

Joe Harrity

Joe Harrity is Senior Lecturer in Organic Chemistry at the University of Sheffield. He received his B.Sc. degree from the University of Strathclyde in 1991 where he remained to undertake his Ph.D. studies (1991-1994) under the guidance of Prof. W.J. Kerr. He carried out postdoctoral studies in Boston College, USA (1994-1997) with Prof. Amir Hoveyda before returning to take up a lectureship in 1997 at the University of Sheffield. His recent research interests have focused on developing new strategies towards carbon-carbon bond forming processes for which he was awarded the Pfizer Discovery Academic Award in 2004.

Mimi Hii

Dr. Mimi Hii obtained her BSc(Hons) and PhD degrees from The University of Leeds. This was followed by postdoctoral research work at Oxford University and a brief spell as a Ramsay Memorial Fellow, before her first Lectureship appointment at King's College London. In 2003, she was promoted to a Senior Lectureship at Imperial College.

Shu Kobayashi

Shu Kobayashi is currently Professor in the Graduate School of Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of Tokyo. He became an Assistant Professor at Science University of Tokyo (SUT) in 1987, and began his independent career in the Department of Applied Chemistry, Faculty of Science, SUT in 1991. In 1998 Dr. Kobayashi moved to his current position at the University of Tokyo as a full professor. From 2003, he is also a director of ERATO project (JST).

Benjamin List

Benjamin List received his PhD in 1997 from the University of Frankfurt in Germany. After postdoctoral studies at The Scripps Research Institute, he became an Assistant Professor there in 1999. In 2003, he moved to the Max-Planck-Institut für Kohlenforschung where he is currently Director of the Department of Homogenous Catalysis. He also is an Honorary Professor at the University of Cologne.

Goverdhan Mehta

Goverdhan Mehta received his Ph.D(1966) in organic chemistry from Poona University/National Chemical Laboratory and carried out postdoctoral research at the Michigan State University and the Ohio State University. He has held academic positions at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur and the University of Hyderabad (Dean 1977-87 and Vice- Chancellor 1994-1998). From 1998-2003, he was Professor of Organic Chemistry and the Director of the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore. He is presently, CSIR Bhatnagar Fellow at the same Institute and also Distinguished Research Professor at the Institute of Life Sciences in Hyderabad. He has held the Srinivas Ramanujan Research Professorship of the Indian National Science Academy (1992-1997) besides many named visiting Professorships in US, UK, Germany, France and Japan among other countries. Recipient of over 30 awards and honorary doctorate degrees in India and overseas, he has presented over 250 plenary/ invited/named lectures in many countries and published over 400 research papers. Mehta has served on the Editorial Boards of a dozen leading Journals in Chemistry. He is a Fellow of several science academies including the Indian National Science Academy (FNA), the Royal Society (FRS) and the Russian Academy of Sciences. Recently, he has been named the Honorary Fellow (Hon. FRSC) of the Royal Society of Chemistry and conferred the Trieste Science Prize 2007 in Chemical Sciences by the Academy of Science of the Developing World (TWAS).

David Procter

David Procter obtained his BSc in Chemistry from the University of Leeds in 1992 and his PhD in 1995 working with Professor Chris Rayner on the chemistry of selenoxides. He then spent two years as a postdoctoral research associate with Professor Robert Holton at Florida State University in Tallahassee, USA working on the synthesis of analogues of the anticancer agent Taxol. In November 1997 he took up a Lectureship at the University of Glasgow and was promoted to Senior Lecturer in February 2004. In September 2004, he moved to a Readership at the University of Manchester. His research interests lie in the development of new organic reactions, particularly using the reagent samarium iodide, natural product and high-throughput synthesis.

Michael S Sherburn

Michael S. Sherburn is a graduate of the University of Nottingham. He held academic positions in New Zealand and at the University of Sydney before joining the Research School of Chemistry, ANU in 2002. His group develops enabling methods for efficient chemical syntheses and applies them in natural product total synthesis, fundamental hydrocarbon structures, and in self-assembly and host-guest chemistry. He was awarded the Le Fèvre Memorial Prize of the Australian Academy of Science in 2006.

Amos B Smith

Amos B. Smith, III received a B.S.-M.S. degree in chemistry from Bucknell University and a Ph.D. from The Rockefeller University.  After a postdoctoral year at Rockefeller, he joined the Chemistry Department at the University of Pennsylvania; currently he is the Rhodes-Thompson Professor of Chemistry, the Associate Director of the Penn Center for Molecular Discovery, and the inaugural Editor-in-Chief of Organic Letters. From 1988-1996 he served as Chair of the Department. His research interests, recorded in over 500 articles, includes organic synthesis, particularly the synthesis of architecturally complex bioactive natural products, bioorganic chemistry and materials science.

Robert Stockman

Robert Stockman was appointed as a Lecturer in Organic Chemistry at the University of East Anglia in 1999, having completed his PhD studies at University of Bristol in the group of Professor Tim Gallagher and a postdoctoral fellowship with Professor Philip Magnus, FRS, at the University of Texas at Austin. His research interests encompass the development of new methods for the asymmetric synthesis of functionalised heterocycles and the use of combined two-directional synthesis/cascade approaches for target- and diversity-oriented synthesis.

Keisuke Suzuki

Keisuke Suzuki:  Born in 1954.   PhD; Univ. of Tokyo (Prof. T. Mukaiyama, 1983).   Research Associate (1983, Prof. G. Tsuchihashi) at Keio Univ., Assistant Professor (1986), Associate Professor (1989), Professor (1994), moved to Tokyo Institute of Technology (1996).   Sabbatical: ETH, Prof. D. Seebach, (1990-1991).   Awards; the Japan Chemical Society Award for Young Chemists (1986), Japan IBM Award (1994), Nagoya Silver Medal (1999), Synthetic Organic Chemistry Award, Japan (2003).

Dean Toste

Dean Toste received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in chemistry from the University of Toronto, Canada. In 2000, he completed his doctoral studies at Stanford University under the direction of Professor Barry M. Trost for which he was awarded the ACS Nobel Laureate Signature Award.

Following postdoctoral studies with Professor Robert H. Grubbs at Caltech, he joined the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley in 2002 and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2006.

Jieping Zhu

Director of Research at CNRS, obtained his Ph.D. degree in 1991 from Université Paris XI under the supervision of Professor H.-P. Husson and Professor J.-C Quirion. After 18 months post-doctoral stay with Professor Sir D. H. R. Barton at Texas A & M University, he joined the Institut de Chimie des Substances Naturelles, CNRS, France in December 1992. His research is focused on the development of novel synthetic methods, their applications in synthesis of bioactive natural products and the design of novel multicomponent reactions.