The scientific program will cover a broad range of topics in synthetic chemistry, including asymmetric synthesis of natural products, catalysis, polymer synthesis, medicinal chemistry and carbohydrate chemistry.
Short oral communications from students, Ph.D. students, post-docs and industrial participants working in the field of synthetic chemistry. A poster session together with exhibition is scheduled for Wednesday afternoon, May 23.
Dr Gaunt is one of the rising stars in enantioselective catalysis in Europe. His contributions include 1) highly enantoselective organocatalytic cyclopropanations with ammonium ylides, 2) palladium-catalyzed alkenylations of indoles and pyrroles and 3) organocatalytic [2,3]-Wittig rearrangements.
Professor Haddleton is a polymer chemist working on designer polymers, including highly functionalized polymers bearing glycosylated units that exhibit intriguing biological activites. In addition, his group has successfully commercialized many of their designer polymers and polymerization methods.
Professor Rieger was recently appointed by Munich Technical University to hold the Wacker Chair of Macromolecular Chemistry and head the new Institute of Silicon Chemistry. He has made major contributions in metallocene chemistry and late transition metal complexes in copolymerization of polar comonomers. Besides the polymerization catalysts he has also studied oxidation catalysis and nanostructures formd by self-assembled manolayers. Professor Rieger has received many awards and honours, for example award of Philips Morris Foundation in 2006. In 2007 he will receive the honorary doctor's degree at University of Helsinki.
The Seeberger group specializes in carbohydrate chemistry and glycobiology. Among their recent achievements, they have accomplished the chemical synthesis of the anthrax spore surface tetrasaccharide and used the product to elicit a specific antibody. The antibody could potentially be used as a diagnostic tool for anthrax.
Professor Strømgaard is specialized in a field of chemical biology. The main focus of the Chemical Biology group is the study of membrane-bound protein, such as ion channels, receptors and transporters, in the central nervous system, which examines the structure and function of these proteins at the molecular level. The research follows two approaches: 1) Perturbation of protein function using small molecule ligands, and 2) Probing biological activity by the incorporation of unnatural amino acids into proteins.