ESOC 2023

Saron Catak obtained a joint (co-tutelle) PhD in computational chemistry from the University of Lorraine (Nancy, FR) and Bogazici University (Istanbul, TR) in 2008. She was a postdoctoral researcher in Prof. Kendall N. Houk’s group at the University of California, Los Angeles, before joining the Center for Molecular Modeling (CMM) at Ghent University (Belgium) as a research associate and group leader for computational organic chemistry. Prior to joining Bogazici University as full-time faculty in 2013, she worked as Team Leader in the Computational Chemistry group at Syngenta Crop Protection (Basel, CH). She currently holds a full professor position and is Head of the Department of Chemistry since 2022. Her research group, ‘Computational Chemistry and Biochemistry’ (www.ccbg.boun.edu.tr) explores a multitude of chemical and biochemical topics using computational methods ranging from quantum mechanics, DFT, molecular dynamics to drug discovery. One of her main research interests is simulations of organic reactions in solution as well as biochemical reactions in biological systems.

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 Associate Editor of the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

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 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.

Benjamin List was born in Frankfurt am Main in 1968. He studied chemistry at the Free University of Berlin and received his PhD from the Goethe University in Frankfurt (1997, Prof. G. Mulzer). He worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla/United States from 1997 to 1998 and as an assistant professor from 1999 to 2003. In 2003, he moved to the Max-Planck-Institut für Kohlenforschung in Mülheim/Ruhr as head of a research group and became one of the directors there in 2005. He still holds this position today. He also heads a research group at Hokkaido University in Japan and is an honorary professor at the University of Cologne. List has been awarded dozens of prestigious prizes in the field of chemistry. In 2021, he received the Nobel Prize for his work on asymmetric organocatalysis. Benjamin List lives in Mülheim Ruhr, he is married and father of two grown-up sons.

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.

Nicolas Winssinger received his B.Sc. in chemistry from Tufts University. He then carried out his doctoral studies under the tutelage of professor KC Nicolaou at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI). After his PhD, he remained at Scripps to work in the group of professor P.G. Schultz as an NIH postdoctoral fellow. In 2002, he moved to the Institut de Science et Ingénierie Supramoléculaires (ISIS), Strasbourg University (formerly Université Louis Pasteur) as an assistant professor and was promoted to full professor in 2005. Shortly thereafter, he was elected to the Insitut Universitaire de France (IUF). In 2012 he moved to the University of Geneva where he currently is a professor in the department of organic chemistry.

His current research aims to develop enabling methods in chemistry to further our understanding of complex biological networks. An important theme through this research is the use of unnatural nucleic acid (PNA) to program spatial organization and reactivity. A long-term objective is to extend these principles towards complex systems that can emulate some of the fundamental features of living systems. An integral part of these endeavors is the use of bioactive small molecules that can modulate protein function with a particular focus on biologically validated natural products.

Gonçalo Bernardes is a Professor of Chemical Biology at the Department of Chemistry, University of Cambridge, UK and Fellow of Trinity Hall College, Cambridge, UK.

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 he has been promoted to Reader (Associate Professor) in 2019 and to Full Professor in 2022.

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 from the Royal Society of Chemistry, the 2020 Young Chemical Biologist Award from the International Chemical Biology Society (ICBS) and recently the Blavatnik Award for Young Scientist in the UK – Finalist in Chemistry. His research group interests focus on the use of chemistry principles to tackle challenging biological problems for understanding and fight cancer. He has co-founded two companies that use technologies he developed in his lab, serves as an advisor / scientific board member of several companies and recently became a Senior Fellow at Flagship Pioneering.

Yoann Coquerel was born in Rouen (France) in 1975. He started his education at the Université de Bourgogne and moved to the Université Grenoble Alpes where he earned his Ph.D. in 2001. He pursued postdoctoral studies at Florida State University. In 2003, he joined Aix-Marseille Université as a Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) research fellow and was promoted research director in 2015. His current research interests are focused on chirality in aromatic organic molecules, from stereoselective synthesis to physical chemistry.

Wim De Borggraeve is group leader of the MolDesignS research group at the Department of Chemistry 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 as assistant professor at the Department of Chemistry at KU Leuven. In 2022 he was promoted to full professor. Next to teaching chemistry courses to over 500 students each year, he does research in medicinal chemistry and synthetic method development.

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.

Trond Vidar Hansen is professor in medicinal chemistry at the Department of Pharmacy, University of Oslo. He received his Ph.D. degree from The Norwegian University of Life Sciences in 2001 with professors Yngve H. Stenstrøm and Lars Skattebøl as supervisors. After a short period working in industry he was a post-doctoral fellow at the Department of Pharmacy, University of Oslo (2001-2003, Professor Lars Skattebøl) and The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California (2004, Professor K. Barry Sharpless). He began his independent academic career as an associate professor in medicinal chemistry at the Department of Pharmacy, University of Oslo, in late 2004, where he was promoted to full professor in 2011. Dr. Hansen’s research activities focuses on method development, total synthesis of bioactive lipids and medicinal chemistry in a broad meaning.

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 in 2009, and promoted to associate professor in 2014. Since 2018, he is a team leader at RIKEN, and since 2021, professor adjunct at Saitama University.

Mónica H. Pérez-Temprano obtained her PhD in 2011 at the University of Valladolid (Spain) under the supervision of Prof. Espinet and Prof. Casares. In 2012, she joined the research group of Prof. Melanie 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), and in 2022, she was promoted to Senior ICIQ Group Leader.

Her research group group is focused on using mechanisms as a priori tool for developing innovative and more sustainable first-row metal-catalyzed transformations. Her research career has been recognized with different awards and honors including her selection as one of the “Talented 12” of 2018 by Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN), the 2020 Young Investigator Group Leader Award by the Spanish Royal Society of Chemistry or the 2021 Young Investigator Award by the EuChemS Division of Organic Chemistry. In addition, she is member of the International Advisory Board of Organometallics, Chem Catalysis and the Early Career Advisory Board of Chemistry – A European Journal.

Erwan Poupon is a full professor of Natural Product Chemistry at Paris-Saclay University. He obtained his PharmD from the University of Rennes in 1996 and his PhD from Paris-Descartes University in 2000 under the guidance of Pr Henri-Philippe Husson and Dr. Nicole Kunesh. After a post-doctoral period in the group of Pr Emmanuel Theodorakis (University of California in San Diego, USA), he joined the faculty at Paris-Sud University (now Université Paris-Saclay). He is particularly interested in understanding the intimate mechanisms involved in the biosynthetic pathways of specialized metabolites that can explain the “emergence” of molecular complexity. Other interests include the anticipation and discovery of new natural products from plants, marine invertebrates and micro-organisms as well as natural product-based drug design.

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 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 a temporary assistant professor position (ATER) at the University of Strasbourg (Prof. P. Compain), she joined CNRS in 2013 as an associate researcher and in 2021 she has been promoted to Research Director. Her research focuses on the transition metal-catalyzed asymmetric C–H activation, synthesis of axially chiral compounds, and chemistry of hypervalent compounds, including original hypervalent bromines. Her recent awards and distinctions include Bronze Medal of CNRS 2020, ERC-SG (2020), Guy Ourisson 2020 award attributed by Cercle Gutenberg, and Prize M. Julia for Emerging Talents, French Society of Chemistry, Organic Chemistry Division, (2018). She has published 63 articles and is the author of 2 patents.