Student Hosted Colloquium: Professor F. Dean Toste, UC Berkeley
About the Seminar
"Supramolecular Hosts as Enzyme Mimics"
Modern organic synthesis relies heavily on selective reactions to enable sustainable access to fine chemicals and pharmaceuticals. In enzymatic catalysis, nature employs various mechanisms to achieve the desired selectivity and activity. Similarly, we have explored organic and organometallic reactions catalyzed by self-assembled water-soluble supramolecular clusters. These supramolecular hosts offer a confined environment that can enhance selectivity and accelerate reaction rates, as well as enable new product formation not achievable by uncatalyzed processes. The lecture will focus on the research in the field of supramolecular catalysis, discussing the reactions promoted by encapsulation, the underlying interactions enabling catalysis, and the mechanisms involved.
About the Speaker
Prof. Toste graduated with a B.Sc. (1993) and M.Sc. (1995) from the University of Toronto. He completed his PhD at Stanford University (2000) under the guidance Professor Barry Trost. After a post-doctoral appointment with Professor Robert Grubbs at the California Institute of Technology, he took a position as an Assistant Professor of Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley in 2002 and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2006. Since 2017 he has been the Gerald K. Branch Distinguished Professor of Chemistry and is currently the Joel H. Hildebrand Distinguished Professor & Chair of the Department of Chemistry
Prof. Toste and his coworkers were instrumental in the advancement of the field of homogeneous catalysis with gold. The Toste group also played a leading role establishing chiral counterions as a paradigm for asymmetric catalysis and chiral anion phase transfer catalysis. More recently, Prof. Toste and his collaborators have explored applications of organic synthesis and physical organic chemistry in supramolecular catalysts for organic reaction, methods for selective functionalization of biomolecules and energy storage and conversion.
Toste’s honors include the Janssen, BASF and Mitsui Awards; the OMCOS Award and Thieme-IUPAC Prize from IUPAC; the Nobel Laureate Signature, Cope Scholar, E.J. Corey and the Creativity in Organic Synthesis Awards from the American Chemical Society; the Merck Award from the Royal Society of Chemistry; the Mukaiyama Award from the Society of Synthetic Organic Chemistry Japan and the Horst-Parcejus Prize from the German Chemical Society (GDCH). He is an elected fellow of the Royal Society of Canada – Academy of Science, the United States National Academy of Science and the American Academy of Arts and Science.