NJACS - 2006 Visions in Chemistry Symposium Speakers

Sanofi-Aventis Visions in Chemistry Symposium, 2006
Speaker Biographies

Phil Baran

Professor Phil Baran was born in Denville, New Jersey in 1977. He received his B. S. in chemistry from NYU while conducting research with Professor David Schuster. In 1997, he joined the lab of Professor K. C. Nicolaou at The Scripps Research Institute as an NSF predoctoral fellow. From 2001-2003 he was an NIH postdoctoral fellow at Harvard in the laboratory of Professor E. J. Corey. His independent career began in the summer of 2003 and focused on the invention of useful chemistry by designing practical and efficient total syntheses of complex natural products. Professor Baran is currently an Assistant Professor of Chemistry at the Scripps Research Institute, where his research is focused on solving interesting challenges in the total synthesis of natural products and in bridging gaps in synthetic capabilities by the invention of new reactions. He has authored over 50 publications in the field of organic synthesis.

Christopher A. Lipinski

Dr. Lipinski retired from the position of Senior Research Fellow in the Exploratory Medicinal Sciences Department at the Pfizer Global Research and Development Groton Laboratories in June 2002. He received a B.Sc. degree in chemistry from San Francisco State College in 1965 and a Ph.D. in 1968 in physical organic chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley. He joined Pfizer in 1970 following a National Institutes of General Medical Sciences Postdoctoral Fellowship at the California Institute of Technology. At Pfizer from 1970 to 1990 he supervised medicinal chemistry drug discovery laboratories discovering multiple gastrointestinal and diabetic clinical candidates. In this process he became interested in the design of bioisosteres and in drug physical chemical properties and quantitative structure activity relationships, especially as they related to problems of oral activity. In 1990 he established a highly automated laboratory combining computations and experimental physical property measurements. Experimentally, his laboratory provided experimental solubility measurements on medicinal compounds synthesized at the Pfizer Groton site. Computationally he champions a very pragmatic, chemistry end user oriented, approach to the problem of oral activity improvement. He is a member of the Medicinal Chemistry section of the American Chemical Society, the American Association of Pharmaceutical Sciences, the Society for Biomolecular Screening and the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Sciences. He serves on the scientific advisory board for Melior Discovery, ASDI biosciences, the Global Alliance for TB Drug Development, the Matrical company and is a consultant for the Hereditary Disease Foundation. He is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences and the highlights advisory board of Nature Reviews Drug Discovery and the advisory boards of several other journals. He is the Society of Biomolecular Science’s winner of the 2006 SBS Achievement Award for Innovation in HTS, the American Chemical Society's 2005 winner of the E. B. Hershberg Award for Important Discoveries in Medicinally Active Substances and the 2004 winner of the Division of Medicinal Chemistry Award of the ACS Division of Medicinal Chemistry. Since 1984, he has been an adjunct faculty member at Connecticut College in New London CT, and has over 210 publications and invited presentations and 17 issued US patents.

Viresh Rawal

Viresh Rawal was born in India in 1958 and immigrated with his family to the United States in 1968, settling in Connecticut. He received his B.S. degree from The University of Connecticut (1980) and his Ph.D. from University of Pennsylvania (1986). His doctoral research, carried out under professor Michael P. Cava, dealt with the development of an efficient route for the synthesis of the potent antitumor agent CC-1065. From 1986 to 1988 he was a postdoctoral associate at Columbia University in the laboratories of Professor Gilbert Stork. In 1988 he accepted a faculty position at The Ohio State University and was promoted to Associate Professor in 1994. In the autumn of 1995 he moved to the University of Chicago as an Associate Professor and was subsequently promoted to Professor.

His research interests are in the general area of organic synthesis, with the goal of developing effective methods and strategies for the synthesis of complex bioactive molecules. This effort has culminated in the synthesis of several intricate targets, including isocomene and (-)-isocomene, endo-hirsutene, modhephene, silphiperfol-6-ene, alpha-elemene, (±) and (+)-tabersonine, (+)-11-methoxytabersonine (+)-aspidospermidine, (-)-dehydroquebrachamine, (-)-quebrachamine, arborescidines A-C, geissoschizal, (+)-geissoschizine, dehydrotubifoline, akuammicine, zenkerene, elisapterosin B, lycorane, (+)-methyl pederate, mycalamide A, and strychnine. Methodology development has played a central role in these total synthesis exercises. In recent years, his group has focused on the development of effective catalysts for highly enantioselective reactions and on the use of hydrogen bonding for catalysis of reactions. His work has been recognized through awards from Eli Lilly (1993-1995), American Cyanamid (1994), Merck (1995), and Pfizer Research Laboratories (1995-1998). He is also the recipient of the American Cancer Society Junior Faculty Award (1990-1993) the American Chemical Society's Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award (2003) and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has served on the NIH Medicinal Chemistry Study Section (1999-2003) and is currently on Cancer Drug Development Proposal Evaluation Committee for the American Cancer Society (2005-?). He is also a member of editorial board of The Journal of Organic Chemistry (2004-2008).

Amos B Smith III

Amos B. Smith, III (born August 26, 1944) received his early education in Lewisburg, PA. In 1966 he was awarded Bucknell University's first combined four-year B.S.-M.S. degree in Chemistry. After a year in medical school (University of Pennsylvania), he earned his Ph.D. degree (1972) and completed a year as a Research Associate at Rockefeller University. In 1973, he joined the Department of Chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania; currently, he is the Rhodes-Thompson Professor of Chemistry. In addition, he is a Member of the Monell Chemical Senses Center, the Associate Director of the Penn Center for Molecular Discovery (PCMD), and from 1976- 2000, he was a Member of the Laboratory for Research on the Structure of Matter (LRSM). In 2001, he was appointed as an Honorary Member, where he serves as a a Visiting Director at the Kitasato Institute (Tokyo, Japan). From 1988 to 1996 he served as Chairman of the Department of Chemistry. In 1998 he became the first Editor-in- Chief of the new American Chemical Society journal, Organic Letters. Smith's research interests encompass three diverse areas: natural product synthesis, bioorganic chemistry and materials science.

To date more than 75 architecturally complex natural products have been prepared in his Laboratory. In addition, Smith, in collaboration with Ralph Hirschmann, has achieved the design and synthesis of non-peptide peptidomimetics of neuropeptideic hormone/transmitters and protease enzyme inhibitors and, also with Stephen Benkovic (Penn State), haptens for the production of catalytic antibodies capable of peptide bond formation. At Monell, in collaboration with Peter Jurs (Penn State), he pioneered the use of computerized pattern recognition techniques for the analysis of primate chemical communication. Collaborative programs at the LRSM include the chemistry and physics of novel liquid crystals and the fullerenes. Smith has been a Visiting Professor at Columbia, Cambridge (UK) and Auckland (NZ) Universities. Editorial Board memberships include the Journal of the American Chemical Society (1988-1993), the Journal of Organic Chemistry (1982- 1986, 1994-), Accounts of Chemical Research (2002-), Journal of the Chemical Society, Perkin Transactions I (1992-2001), Organic Reactions (1987-), Organic Synthesis (1990-1998), Fullerene Science and Technology (1993-1996), Regional Editor (1997-2001), Synlett (1995-1998), Tetrahedron Publications (1996-), Journal of Antibiotics (1999-) and Chemical & Pharmaceutical Bulletin (2000-). He has also served on the NIH Medicinal Chemistry A Study Section as Member (1993-1987 and 1995-1998) and as Chair (1997-1999), and on the Executive Committee of the Organic Division of the ACS, as Chair- Elect, Chair, and Past-Chair (1995-1997). Currently, he is a Member of the Board of Directors of both Organic Reactions (1995-) and Organic Syntheses (2002-).

To date, Smith has co-authored over 450 publications and has delivered over 600 invited lectures, including plenary lectures at the National Organic Chemistry Symposium (1983, 1993), numerous Gordon Research Conferences, the Royal Society Christmas Lectures (Edinburgh, Scotland and Cardiff, Wales), the 3éme Cycle en Chimie (French Speaking Universities in Switzerland), the W. S. Johnson Symposium (Stanford University), the Leermakers Symposium, the Stork Lectureship (Columbia University), the Nelson J. Leonard Lectureship (University of Illinois) and the Bristol-Myers Squibb Lectureship (Harvard). His honors and awards include the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Teacher Scholar Award (1978), the NIH Career Development Award (1980), The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (1985), The Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Fellowship (1986), the Philadelphia Section Award of the ACS (1986), The Kitasato Institute Medal (1990), the first Philadelphia Organic Chemist's Club Award (1990), the Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award (1991), Honor Scroll Award-American Institute of Chemists (1991), the Alexander von Humboldt Research Award for Senior U.S. Scientists (1992), Bucknell University Alumni Award for Outstanding Professional Achievement (1993), the ACS Ernest Guenther Award (1993), the University of Oregon Creativity Award (1997), the ACS Award for Creativity in Organic Chemistry (1997), Honorary Membership in the Pharmaceutical Society of Japan (1999), Honorary Member, Kitasato Institute (2001), Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science (2002), the Centenary Medal, Royal Society of Chemistry, London, UK (2002), the 2003 Yamada Prize (Tokyo, Japan), and the first Provost’s Award for Distinguished Teaching and Mentoring of Ph.D. Students, University of Pennsylvania (2004), and the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon from the Government of Japan.

Tony Zhang, Ph.D.

Tony Zhang was born and raised in China’s east coast. He attended Shandong University, where he carried out undergraduate research in polymer chemistry and obtained his B.S. degree in 1982. He came to the United States in 1983 as a CGP Fellow and joined Professor Ei-ichi Negishi’s group at Purdue University as a graduate student, receiving his Ph.D. in 1989. His doctoral research was focused on palladium-catalyzed cyclization reactions involving alkenes and alkynes.

From 1989-1992, Tony worked at Reilly Industries, Inc., a chemical company at Indianapolis specializing in pyridines and other heterocycles, where he developed a fundamental appreciation for engineering scale-up and the supply side of the fine chemical business. In 1992 he moved to Eli Lilly as a Senior Organic Chemist in the Division of Chemical Process R&D, and was promoted to Research Scientist in 1996, Senior Research Scientist in 2000, and Research Advisor in 2004. He has led multi-disciplined teams engaged in both process and medicinal chemistry, developing molecules for bone/metabolic diseases, CNS disorders, and oncology. He was credited with the establishment of a dedicated laboratory for automated reaction screening, and one for crystal characterization and development. Tony was also a key initiator and implementer of Lilly’s industry leading R&D effort in China. He has patented, published, and lectured extensively in areas of synthetic methodology, heterocyclic chemistry, transition metal catalysis, and asymmetric synthesis. Currently he is Research Fellow for Chemical Product R&D, leading the synthetic route design effort for Lilly’s portfolio of drug candidates.

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