Student Hosted Colloquia: Professor Richmond Sarpong, UC Berkeley
Student Hosted Colloquia: Professor Richmond Sarpong, UC Berkeley (Host: Ciara Ordner)
**This seminar is sponsored by Merck**
"Break-it-to-Make-it Strategies for Chemical Synthesis Inspired by Complex Natural Products"
About the Seminar
Natural products continue to inspire and serve as the basis of new medicines. They also provide intricate problems that expose limitations in the strategies and methods employed in chemical synthesis. Several strategies and methods that have been developed in our laboratory and applied to the syntheses of architecturally complex natural products will be discussed. In particular, new ways to employ the cleavage of core bonds such as C–C and C–N bonds (i.e., break-it-to-make-it strategies) in complex molecule synthesis will be presented.
About the Speaker
Richmond Sarpong is a Professor of Chemistry at the University of California Berkeley where he and his group specialize in synthetic organic chemistry. Richmond became interested in chemistry after seeing, firsthand, the effectiveness of the drug ivermectin in combating river blindness during his childhood in Ghana, West Africa. Richmond described his influences and inspirations in a TEDxBerkeley talk in 2015 (Face of Disease in Sub-Saharan Africa - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIsY87-zkXA). Richmond completed his undergraduate studies at Macalester College in St. Paul, MN and his graduate work was carried out with Prof. Martin Semmelhack at Princeton. He conducted postdoctoral studies at Caltech with Prof. Brian Stoltz.
At Berkeley, Richmond’s laboratory focuses on the synthesis of bioactive complex organic molecules. He enjoys teaching and was the recipient of the 2009 UC Berkeley Department of Chemistry teaching award, the 2016 Noyce Prize for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in the Physical Sciences at Berkeley, and the 2021 ACS-DOC Edward Leete Award for teaching and research. Richmond’s research group has published over 135 papers and he has received numerous awards in recognition of his research including an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship, Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Fellowship, Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, ACS Cope Scholar Award, NSF Career Award, the 2015 Royal Society of Chemistry Synthetic Organic Chemistry Award, a 2017 Guggenheim Fellowship, the ISHC Katritzky Award, the Society of Synthetic Organic Chemistry Japan Mukaiyama Award for 2019, the and the ACS Award for Creative Work in Synthetic Organic Chemistry for 2022.