Lecture: «Ligand Total Synthesis: a Driving Force for Innovation»
Prof. Abraham Mendoza (Assistant Prof. at Stockholm University ‐ Sweden)
CiQUS Seminar Room - 12:15h
Natural products are an abundant source of synthetic challenges that foster important breakthroughs in organic chemistry. Despite the superior complexity of these targets, ligand total synthesis can address unsolved chemical problems through new fundamental transformations and provide access to creative catalyst designs.
In this talk Prof Mendoza will present a comparative analysis of natural and ligand total synthesis to provide a context for his recent research and to motivate the importance of future undertakings in this area. In particular, recent research in photochemical organometallic reactions and latest work in other challenging C–C coupling processes will be discussed.
About the speaker
Dr. Abraham Mendoza was born and raised in Gijón, in the north coast of Spain. He obtained his BSc and PhD degrees in Chemistry (2009) at the Univ. of Oviedo with Profs. J. Barluenga, F. J. Fañanás and F. Rodríguez (working in Cr and W carbene complexes, carbophilic activation of alkynes and the total synthesis of (–)-Berkelic acid).
He awarded a Fulbright Fellowship (2010-2012) to join Prof. P. S. Baran at The Scripps Research Institute (working on scalable taxane total synthesis and alkane dehydrogenation) and then retuned to Europe as a Marie Curie Fellow (2012-2013) at the Univ. of Cambridge with Prof. M. J. Gaunt (working in C–H insertion catalysis and bio-orthogonal arylation of biomolecules). In late 2013, he started his independent career at Stockholm University as a Junior Researcher of the Swedish Research Council and became a member of the Berzelii EXSELENT Center on Porous Materials.
His research group is currently pursuing scalable and automatic synthetic methods involving C–H functionalization, oxidative coupling and main-group organometallic photochemistry