Thomas J. Colacot
Dr Thomas John Colacot was born in Central Kerala, India. After finishing his PhD in Chemistry at IIT Madras with Prof. M.N.S. Rao in 1989, he moved to the University of Alabama at Birmingham for a combined teaching and post-doctoral research position in the area of Group III-V Chemistry with Prof. L. K. Krannich. In 1992, he became an Asst. Professor at Florida A & M University, while collaborating with Prof. Will Rees at Florida State University. Due to family commitments, he moved to Southern Methodist University, Dallas in 1993 to work with Professor N.S. Hosmane on an Advanced Technology Program/AMCO project. Although Prof. Hosmane and Dr Colacot did not have any previous experience in catalysis, Dr Hosmane gave him complete freedom to explore catalysis research using mixed carborane–cyclopentadiene complexes of early transition metals for the manufacture of plastics (olefin polymerization).
In 1995, Dr Colacot began his career at Johnson Matthey, USA, directing the homogeneous catalysis research group. With an extensive background in ligand technology obtained during his time at IIT Madras, Chennai and UAB, in conjunction with his studies in catalysis from SMU, Dr Colacot focused his research in the area of precious metal catalysis and has become an industrial expert in cross coupling.
Through his research, Dr Colacot and his group have generated highly active, practical palladium based cross coupling catalysts for applications in pharmaceutical, fine chemical and academic labs. Currently, Dr Colacot is the R&D Global Manager of Homogeneous Catalysis. He has given numerous invited and plenary lectures in many international conferences and acts as an external PhD thesis examiner to IITs and universities and a visiting professor in many universities. He has contributed several publications, patents, book chapters and reviews. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry and has obtained a MBA from Pennsylvania State University. He received Royal Society’s 2012 RSC Applied Catalysis Award and Medal for his “exceptional contributions” to Homogeneous Catalysis, particularly for making this technology accessible to industry and academia, and recently he has received the 2015 American Chemical Society Award for Industrial Chemistry in “recognition of his contributions and leadership in the development and commercialization of ligands and precatalysts for metal-catalyzed organic synthesis, particularly cross-couplings, for industrial and academic use and applications”. Dr Colacot has coauthored Chapters 1–3 of this book.
Christopher F. J. Barnard
Dr Christopher F. J. Barnard has worked for Johnson Matthey for 35 years. His principal contributions have been to the development of platinum compounds as the active ingredients in anti-cancer drugs and in developing catalytic chemistry for synthesis in pharmaceutical applications. Palladium-based chemistries such as coupling and carbonylation have been areas of particular interest in recent years.
Irina P. Beletskaya
Irina P. Beletskaya received her Diploma degree in 1955, her PhD degree in 1958 and her Doctor of Chemistry degree in 1963 from Moscow State University. The subject of the last degree was Electrophilic Substitution at Saturated Carbon. She became a Full Professor at Moscow State University in 1970, and in 1974 she became a Corresponding Member of the Academy of Sciences (USSR), of which she became a full member (Academician) in 1992. She is currently Head of the Laboratory of Organoelement Compounds, Department of Chemistry, Moscow State University. Irina Beletskaya is Chief Editor of the Russian Journal of Organic Chemistry. She was President of the Organic Chemistry Division of IUPAC from 1989 to 1991. She was a recipient of the Lomonosov Prize (1979), the Mendeleev Prize (1982), The Nesmeyanov Prize (1991), the Demidov Prize (2003) and the State Prize (2004). She is the author of more 600 articles and four monographs. Her current scientific interests are manifold, including transition metal catalysis and organocatalysis in organic synthesis, organometallic derivatives of lanthanides, carbanions and nucleophilic aromatic substitution, supramolecular chemistry, and many others.
Anthony Chartoire
Anthony Chartoire received his MSc and PhD in organic and organometallic chemistry from the University of Nancy, where he worked under the supervision of Prof. Yves Fort until 2010. In 2011, he joined the group of Prof. Steven P. Nolan at the University of St Andrews, where he worked as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow until August 2013. He is currently a research scientist at Econic Technologies. His research interests include organic and organometallic chemistry and homogeneous catalysis.
Andrei V. Cheprakov
Andrei V. Cheprakov graduated from the Department of Chemistry of Moscow State University in 1983 and joined Prof. I. Beletskaya’s Laboratory of Organoelement Compounds. His PhD thesis was devoted to the oxidative halogenation of aromatic compounds and was defended in 1989. Currently he is a Docent at the Chair of Organic Chemistry of Moscow University. His research interests include the methodology of transition metal-catalyzed reactions, reactions in non-conventional aqueous microheterogeneous media, chemistry and applications of brassinosteroids, chemistry of π-extended porphyrinoids and fluorogenic oligopyrrolic ligands.
Cathleen M. Crudden
Cathleen Crudden obtained her BSc and MSc from the University of Toronto with Dr Mark Lautens, and her PhD jointly with Dr Howard Alper at the University of Ottawa and Dr Shinji Murai at Osaka University, Japan. Following this, she took up an NSERC PDF with Prof. Scott Denmark at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. She then became an Assistant Professor at the University of New Brunswick, where she was awarded a Research and Innovation Award and a UNB Merit Award, and received the first university Research Professorship. In 2002, she took up the position of Queen’s National Scholar at Queen’s University, Kingston, ON, Canada, where she was awarded a Premier’s Research and Excellence Award and a Chancellor’s Research Award. One of her publications was in the top 10 most cited papers of the year for all of science in Canada for the year 2006. In 2012 she was appointed Research Professor at the Institute of Transformative Bio-Molecules in Nagoya, Japan. She has won numerous research awards, including the Clara Benson Award for the top female chemist in Canada and an NSERC Accelerator Award. Her diverse research program includes materials chemistry, organic chemistry, catalysis and chirality. She has been a Visiting Professor at the Research Center for Materials Science in Nagoya University, in the laboratories of Prof. Ryoji Noyori (joint recipient of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 2001). In 2008, she was awarded a Global Center of Excellence Professorship at Kyoto University. She was also awarded a Visiting Professorship by the Catalan Government in Tarragona, Spain, in 2007. Cathleen was President of the Canadian Society for Chemistry (CSC) in 2012–13. Prior to becoming CSC President, she served on the Board of Directors for two terms representing the Catalysis Division. She also served on the Editorial Advisory Board for ACCN for 10 years. She has been a member of the organizing committee of Pacifichem for the past 7 years and served as area coordinator for materials and inorganic chemistry.
Andrew DeAngelis
Andrew DeAngelis received his BS in Chemistry from Moravian College, Bethleham, PA, in 2005, where he conducted undergraduate research with Prof. Carl Salter. He then went on to earn his PhD in Chemistry and Biochemistry from the University of Delaware in 2011, where he worked on the development of new catalytic reactions with Rh-carbenoids under the guidance of Prof. Joseph M. Fox. He subsequently pursued postdoctoral studies with Prof. Stephen L. Buchwald at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he worked on the development of new cross-coupling processes in continuous flow. In 2012, he joined Johnson Matthey as a research scientist working in the Catalysis and Chiral Technologies Division in West Deptford, NJ, where he is engaged in the development and applications of novel homogeneous metal catalysts and also process development for scale-up.
Joshua R. Dunetz
Joshua R. Dunetz graduated from Haverford College, Haverford, PA in 2000 with a BA in Chemistry after undergraduate research with Prof. Karin Åkerfeldt. He received his PhD in Organic Chemistry from MIT in 2005 under the guidance of Prof. Rick Danheiser, and then completed postdoctoral studies with Prof. William Roush at the Scripps Research Institute, Jupiter, FL. In early 2008, Joshua joined Pfizer Chemical R&D, where he developed processes for the GMP manufacture of small molecules on the gram to multi-kilogram scale. After six wonderful years with Pfizer, Joshua relocated to California to join the Process Chemistry team at Gilead Sciences.
Ben W. Glasspoole
Ben Glasspoole was raised in Montreal, Quebec and completed his BSc at McGill University in 2006. He then completed his PhD under the guidance of Prof. Cathleen Crudden at Queen’s University, Kingston, ON, Canada in 2011, working in the field of Pd catalysis. During his PhD term he carried out a research exchange with Prof. Varinder Aggarwal. After performing postdoctoral work with Prof. Michael Krische at the University of Texas at Austin, Ben joined Sigma-Aldrich in 2013.
Volker Hessel
Volker Hessel studied chemistry at Mainz University, and from 1994 he was an employee of the Institut für Mikrotechnik Mainz, where in 1999 he was appointed Head of the Microreaction Technology Department. In 2007, Prof. Hessel was appointed Director R&D at IMM. In 2011, he was appointed as full Professor of the Chair of Micro Flow Chemistry and Process Technology at Eindhoven University of Technology. Prof. Hessel received the AIChE award for Excellence in Process Development Research in 2007 and in 2010 an ERC Advanced Grant for Novel Process Windows. He is currently Editor-in-Chief of the journal Green Processing and Synthesis.
Eric C. Keske
Eric Keske was born in London, ON, Canada. He obtained his BSc at the University of Western Ontario in 2009 and then moved to Queen’s University to pursue a PhD in organometallic chemistry with Prof. Cathleen Crudden. During this time he enjoyed short research stays with Dr Eric Fillion at the University of Waterloo and Dr Martin Albrecht at University College Dublin. Eric’s research interests involve late transition metal catalysis and reaction discovery. Eric considers himself a bourbon connoisseur, and can easily be distracted from the laboratory by loud music, whiskey and judo practice.
Kazunori Koide
Professor Koide obtained his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of Tokyo, Japan, where he developed new glycosylation methods in the Ohno group. He then moved to the United States and received a PhD in chemistry at the University of California, San Diego, under the guidance of Professor K. C. Nicolaou. As a Merck Fellow of Cancer Research Fund of the Damon Runyon-Walter Winchell Foundation, he conducted post-doctoral research with Professor Gregory L. Verdine in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard University. He then began his independent academic career in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Pittsburgh. His current research interests include development of new synthetic methods, total synthesis of biologically important natural products, chemical biology and medicinal chemistry of natural products, and development and applications of fluorescent chemosensors and chemodosimeters.
Mark Lautens
Mark Lautens was born in Ontario, Canada. He obtained his BSc degree from the University of Guelph, where he graduated with distinction. He conducted his doctoral studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison under the direction of Barry M. Trost, where he discovered Mo-catalyzed allylic alkylation and Pd enyne cycloisomerization. In 1985, he moved to Harvard University where he conducted his NSERC PDF with David A. Evans on studies directed toward the synthesis of bryostatin, a potent anti-cancer agent. He joined the University of Toronto in 1987 as an NSERC University Research Fellow and Assistant Professor. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 1992 and Professor in 1995. Since 1998, he has held an Endowed Chair, the AstraZeneca Professor of Organic Synthesis, and from 2003–13 he was named an NSERC/Merck Frosst Industrial Research Chair in New Medicinal Agents via Catalytic Reactions. In 2012, he was appointed as University Professor, the highest rank at the University of Toronto.
Hongbo Li
Hongbo Li completed his both BS and MS in Chemistry at Peking University, China before he moved to the USA in 2000. He completed his PhD at Northwestern University under the supervision of Prof. Tobin Marks in 2005. His PhD work focused on the development of novel olefin polymerization catalysts. After working briefly at IBM Almaden Research Center, in 2006 he joined Los Alamos National Laboratory as Research Associate, where he worked on the development of immobilized catalysts. In 2008, he joined the Catalysis and Chiral Technologies Division of Johnson Matthey in West Deptford, NJ, where he is working on the development of novel homogeneous organometallic catalysts.
Christine M. Le
Christine Le was born in 1989 in Canada and completed her BSc degree at Western University. She then moved to the University of Toronto and obtained her Master’s degree in the group of Prof. Vy Dong, where she carried out research in the field of Rh-catalyzed hydroacylation. She is currently pursuing her PhD at the University of Toronto under the supervision of Prof. Mark Lautens. Her research involves asymmetric transformations enabled by Rh and Pd catalysis.
Alastair Lennox
Alastair Lennox is a graduate of Manchester University (2008, 1st class, MChem), where he conducted a final year research project with Dr Ian Watt and spent a year studying at the University of California, Los Angeles. He obtained his PhD in 2012 at the University of Bristol, where he worked under the supervision of Prof. Guy Lloyd-Jones and studied the reactivity of potassium organotrifluoroborate salts in Suzuki–Miyaura couplings.
Guy Lloyd-Jones
Guy Lloyd-Jones studied at Huddersfield Polytechnic (BSc, 1989) and Oxford University (DPhil with John M. Brown FRS, 1992) before tenure of a Royal Society postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Basel with Andreas Pfaltz. He joined the University of Bristol in 1996 and was promoted to full Professor in 2003. In 2013 he was elected to the Royal Society (FRS) and moved to Edinburgh University as the Forbes Professor of Organic Chemistry.
Javier Magano
Javier Magano was born in Madrid, Spain. He received a BS degree in organic chemistry from Complutense University in Madrid and an MS degree in chemistry from the University of Michigan. After working for the oil industry in Spain for several years, he obtained an MS degree in rubber and polymer science at the Center for Advanced Scientific Research in Madrid. After moving back to the USA, he joined the early process chemistry group at Pfizer in 1998 in Ann Arbor, MI, where he spent 9 years developing scalable processes for the preparation of drug candidates. In 2007, he moved to Groton, CT to continue his work as a process chemist and, during this period, he also worked in the area of biologics for 1½ years on the preparation of linkers for bioconjugation processes. Javier currently holds a position in the Chemical Technology group at Pfizer, where he is involved in the applications of high-throughput screening to transition metal-catalyzed cross-couplings. His research interests also include the development of catalytic processes that employ non-precious metals in cross-coupling reactions.
Debabrata Maiti
Debabrata Maiti received his PhD from Johns Hopkins University (USA) in 2008 under the supervision of Prof. Kenneth D. Karlin. After postdoctoral studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) with Prof. Stephen L. Buchwald (2008–10), he joined the Department of Chemistry of IIT Bombay as an Assistant Professor in 2011. His research interests are focused on the development of new and sustainable synthetic methodologies.
Soham Maity
Soham Maity was born in 1988 in West Bengal (India). He studied chemistry at St Xavier’s College, Kolkata, and received his BSc degree in 2009. After completing his MSc degree at the University of Calcutta he joined Prof. D. Maiti’s group in 2011, where he is currently a third-year PhD student.
Arun Maji
Arun Maji was born in 1989 in Durgapur, West Bengal (India). He completed his graduation from Presidency College (Kolkata) and received his BSc degree in 2010. After completing his MSc degree at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, he joined Prof. Maiti’s group in 2012, where he has completed his first year of PhD studies.
Atanu Modak
Atanu Modak was born in 1989 in West Bengal (India). He graduated from Ramakrishna Mission Vidyamandira, Belur, with a BSc degree in chemistry from the University of Calcutta in 2009. He then pursued an MSc degree in chemistry at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, in 2011. From January 2012 he has been working as a PhD student in Prof. D. Maiti’s laboratories at IIT Bombay.
Stephen G. Newman
Stephen G. Newman was born in Newfoundland, Canada in 1985. He obtained a BSc degree with a major in chemistry from Dalhousie University in 2008. In 2012, he graduated with a PhD degree from the University of Toronto under the supervision of Prof. Mark Lautens. He is currently an NSERC Postdoctoral Fellow in the laboratory of Prof. Klavs F. Jensen, and will joining the faculty at the University of Ottawa in summer 2014 as an Assistant Professor of Chemistry.
Timothy Noël
Timothy Noël was born in Aalst, Belgium, and received an MSc degree (Industrial Chemical Engineering) from the KaHo Sint-Lieven in 2004. In 2009, he received his PhD at the University of Ghent with Prof. Johan Van der Eycken (Department of Organic Chemistry). He then moved to Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellow with Prof. Stephen L. Buchwald (Department of Chemistry), where he worked on flow chemistry (MIT–Novartis Center for Continuous Manufacturing). In 2012, he accepted a position as Assistant Professor at Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands. In 2011, Dr Noël received an Incentive Award for Young Researchers from the Comité de Gestion du Bulletin des Sociétés Chimiques Belges. In 2012, he received a prestigious VENI Award from the Dutch Government (NWO). He is also Associate Editor of the Journal of Flow Chemistry. His research interests are focused on the combination of flow chemistry, organic synthetic chemistry and catalysis.
Steven P. Nolan
Steven P. Nolan received his BSc in Chemistry from the University of West Florida and his PhD from the University of Miami where he worked under the supervision of Prof. Carl D. Hoff. After a postdoctoral stay with Prof. Tobin J. Marks at Northwestern University, he joined the Department of Chemistry of the University of New Orleans in 1990. In 2006 he joined the Institute of Chemical Research of Catalonia (ICIQ) as Group leader and ICREA Research Professor. In early 2009, he joined the School of Chemistry at the University of St Andrews where he holds the Chair in Inorganic Chemistry. His research interest include organometallic chemistry and homogeneous catalysis.
David A. Petrone
David A. Petrone was born in Ontario, Canada, in 1989. He obtained his BSc degree with Honors in Chemistry in 2011 from the University of Guelph under the supervision of Prof. Kathryn Preuss and Prof. William Tam. He is currently a PhD student in Mark Lautens’ research laboratory at the University of Toronto, where he is studying Pd(0)-catalyzed carbohalogenation reactions.
Carin C. C. Johansson Seechurn
Carin Johansson Seechurn completed her MChem with French degree at UMIST (University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology) in 2003. This included a year abroad at CPE (l’Ecole Supérieure Chimie, Physique, Electronique de Lyon) in France. From 2003 until 2007 she carried out PhD studies at the University of Cambridge, under the supervision of Prof. Matthew Gaunt. Her PhD work focused on the development of novel organocatalytic methodology. After the completion of the PhD studies, she continued to work for Prof. Gaunt, now in the area of palladium catalysis. In 2008 she joined the Catalysis and Chiral Technologies Division of Johnson Matthey in Royston, UK, where she is working on the development of novel homogeneous metal catalysts.
Upendra Sharma
Upendra Sharma studied chemistry at Guru NankDev University, Amritsar (India) until 2005, and subsequently obtained a PhD degree in organic chemistry with Dr Bikram Singh, Chief Scientist, CSIR–IHBT, Palampur. In the fall of 2012, he joined Prof. D. Maiti at IIT Bombay as Young Scientist. His research interests involve metal-catalyzed selective C–H activation and natural product synthesis.
Kevin H. Shaughnessy
Kevin H. Shaughnessy grew up in the small town of Trumbull, Nebraska. He earned his BS degree from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln in 1992, where he worked with Reuben D. Rieke. He then joined the group of Robert M. Waymouth at Stanford University, where he developed zirconocene-catalyzed carbometallation reactions. Upon completing his PhD degree in 1998, he moved to Yale University to work with John F. Hartwig on palladium-catalyzed enolate arylations and the development of high-throughput screening assays. In 1999, he joined the Chemistry Faculty at the University of Alabama, where he is currently Professor and Chair of Chemistry. His research interests are focused on the development of catalytic methodologies in alternative solvents, design of new ligands, and mechanistic studies of ligand structure–activity relationships.
James P. Stambuli
James Stambuli was born in Paterson, NJ and received his BA in Chemistry with Honors from Rutgers University in Newark, NJ in 1998. He obtained his PhD from Yale University in the laboratory of Prof. John Hartwig in 2003 and was an NIH Postdoctoral Fellow with Prof. Barry Trost at Stanford University from 2003 to 2006. He began an independent research career at the Ohio State University in 2006 and recently joined the PR&D division of AbbVie. Prof. Stambuli’s research is in the fields of organometallic and organic chemistry with particular emphasis on transition metal catalyst design to assist in the invention of new technologies for chemical transformations.
Mark Stradiotto
Mark Stradiotto received his BSc (Hons) degree in Applied Chemistry in 1995 and a PhD in Organometallic Chemistry in 1999 from McMaster University, Canada, the latter under the supervision of Prof. Michael A. Brook and Prof. Michael J. McGlinchey. After conducting research as an NSERC Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California at Berkeley (USA) in the research group of Prof. T. Don Tilley (1999–2001), Mark moved to the Department of Chemistry at Dalhousie University, where he is now the Alexander McLeod Professor of Chemistry. Mark has served as a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of Organometallics, has been named a Synlett/Synthesis Promising Young Professor Journal Awardee, and was awarded the Canadian Society for Chemistry 2012 Strem Chemicals Award for Pure or Applied Inorganic Chemistry.
Xiao-Feng Wu
Xiao-Feng Wu was born in 1985 in China. He studied chemistry in Zhejiang Sci-Tech University (ZSTU), where he obtained his BSc degree in science in 2007. In the same year, he moved to Rennes 1 University in France and worked with Prof C. Darcel on iron-catalyzed reactions. After earning his Master’s degree in 2009, he joined Matthias Beller’s group in the Leibniz Institute for Catalysis (LIKAT) in Germany, where he completed his PhD thesis in January 2012. He subsequently began independent research at ZSTU and LIKAT. His research interests include carbonylation reactions, synthesis of heterocycles and the catalytic application of cheap metals. He was also a Fellow of the Max-Buchner-Forschungsstiftung.
