Three Talented Chemistry Graduate Students Receive 2007-2008 Research Fellowships from Pharmaceutical Companies

Amal Ting - Novartis Graduate Fellowship in Organic Chemistry for Women and Minorities

Amal Ting is a fourth-year graduate student in Prof. Scott Schaus' Group. Her fellowship will support her work investigations of the use of isonitriles in conjunction with imines to synthesize complex heterocycles. This project has been primarily her design and has resulted in two significant reactions. The first is a novel Brønsted acid-promoted construction of tri-substituted oxazoles from the addition of isonitriles to acyl imines. The second is the use of the same acyl imines with isonitriles to afford chiral dihydroimidazoles catalyzed by silver(I) complexes. These two new reactions are complementary processes that use similar starting materials yielding completely different products.

Phil Moquist - Astra Zeneca Graduate Research Fellowship

This is the first year that Astra Zeneca is supporting the Department of the Chemistry through a graduate fellowship for an advance year organic chemistry student. The initial recipient of this award is Phil Moquist, a fourth-year student in Prof. Scott Schaus' Laboratory. Phil has developed a new reaction involving boronic acids. He identified the chemoselective addition of boronates to carbonyl
compounds as his next step. Based on his proposed mechanism, he has identified the chemoselective nucleophilic addition of carbon nucleophiles to the ketone of alpha-keto aldehydes. The reaction leaves the aldehyde intact and yields a tertiary alcohol as the product. This is a new reaction which has never been described in the literature before. The implications of this new type of reactivity for organic chemistry are significant. Phil's preliminary results are extremely promising and could be extended to a wide variety of reactions.

Ji Qi - Merck Research Laboratories-Boston Fellowship

Ji Qi is a fourth-year graduate student in Prof. John Porco's laboratory.  Ji has explored the scope and limitations of the tandem reaction process and has completed the synthesis of the natural product clusianone using the methodology.
A Communication on this work was featured in JACS. The alkylative dearomatization methodology that Ji developed forms the basis of two other important projects in the Porco Group: the synthesis of the polyprenylated phloroglucinol nemorosone and the synthesis of the adamantanyl natural product plukenetione A.

September 2007