12:05 p.m., Aug. 14, 2009----Donald Watson, assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of Delaware, is co-author of a paper that appeared in Science Express this week.

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The paper documents work done by the Buchwald Research Group in the Department of Chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where Watson recently completed a three-year stint as a postdoctoral fellow. Stephen Buchwald is the Camille Dreyfus Professor of Chemistry at MIT.

Watson is the lead author on the paper. The other co-authors, along with Buchwald, are Mingjuan Su, Georgiy Teverovskiy, Yong Zhang, Jorge García-Fortanet and Tom Kinzel. The paper describes a new catalytic method for synthesizing fluorinated aromatic organic molecules, which are of increasing importance in the pharmaceuticals industry

Published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), Science Express provides rapid electronic release of selected research papers, perspectives and other articles that have recently been accepted for publication in Science. The editors select the papers appearing in Science Express from among all fields of science based on the timeliness and importance of the research.

Science is considered the world's leading journal of original scientific research, global news and commentary.

“We were very pleased when we found out that the paper would be published in Science Express,” Watson says. “We hope that the work will provide medicinal chemists with a new tool that will enable them to prepare fluorinated drug candidates in a more rapid fashion.”

Watson, who joined the UD faculty in July 2009, plans to initiate a research program at Delaware focused on the development of transition metal catalysts for applications in organic synthesis and alternative energy.

He earned his B.S. degree from the University of California, San Diego in 1998 and his doctoral degree from the University of California, Irvine in 2004. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley from 2004-2006 and at MIT from 2006-2009.

Article by Diane Kukich
Photo by Evan Krape