Synthesis in a boron world

Host: Prof. Shunsuke Chiba

Biography

Prof. Varinder K. Aggarwal studied chemistry at Cambridge University and received his Ph.D. in 1986 under the guidance of Dr. Stuart Warren. After postdoctoral studies (1986-1988) under Prof. Gilbert Stork, Columbia University, he returned to the UK as a Lecturer at Bath University. In 1991 he moved to Sheffield University, where he was promoted to Professor in 1997. In 2000, he moved to the University of Bristol, where he holds the Chair in Synthetic Chemistry. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 2012.

Prof. Aggarwal is a renowned organic chemist who has developed new chemical methods to assemble complex, biologically important molecules. His research includes new catalytic asymmetric methods, developing new classes of reagents for iterative synthesis, and applications of these methods in the synthesis of complex molecules. Early on his career, he showed how to convert the stoichiometric sulfur ylide epoxidation methodology into a catalytic and asymmetric process, and provided a set of rules that govern both diastereoselectivity and enantioselectivity in this important reaction. He later discovered new asymmetric reactions between sulfur ylides/lithiated carbamates and organoboranes/boronic esters, which lead to homologated organoboron products in high enantioselectivity, including tertiary boronic esters, reactions that could be used iteratively. This work has been particularly impactful, enabling the assembly of complex molecules in a few steps with very high stereocontrol.