UD's first Student Invited Chemistry Seminar postponed

(Editor's note: Due to inclement weather, the guest speaker is unable to attend the March 20 event, which has been postponed.)

4:15 p.m., March 14, 2013--Graduate students in the organic division of the University of Delaware Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry will host the inaugural Student Invited Chemistry Seminar on Wednesday, March 20, starting at 4 p.m., in 101 Brown Laboratory. 

The guest speaker will be Amir Hoveyda, the Joseph T. and Patricia Vanderslice Millennium Professor of Chemistry at Boston College, who will present “Sustainable Catalysts Fueled by a Proton: Simple Organic Molecules as Catalysts for Enantioselective Synthesis of Amines and Alcohols.”

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“Dr. Hoveyda is a luminary in the field of organic chemistry, and we are thrilled that he will be the first person to receive this honor,” said Kirk W. Shimkin, a UD doctoral student who has been involved in establishing the inaugural seminar.

Hoveyda received his doctorate from Yale University and was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard. He is the recipient of numerous awards and honorary fellowships, including the Yamada-Koga Prize in 2010, the National Institutes of Health MERIT Award in 2005 and the American Chemical Society Cope Scholar Award in 1998. He is on the editorial advisory board of the journal Chemical Communications.

A description of his talk follows: 

The discovery of new catalysts that can generate complex organic compounds through enantioselective transformations is central to advances in the life sciences. The ideal catalyst should be devoid of precious or toxic elements and bring reactions to completion in a few hours with operationally simple procedures. In this lecture, a set of small organic molecules will be introduced that catalyze reactions of readily available and robust unsaturated organoboron reagents with imines and carbonyls; the products of the reactions are enantiomerically pure amines and alcohols, which can be used to synthesize more complex, biologically active molecules.