Speaker: Shauna Paradine, University of Rochester
Title: "Catalytic strategies for the selective construction of sp3-rich organic scaffolds"
A native of rural southwest Michigan, Shauna obtained her B.A. in chemistry from Albion College. While there, she worked with Prof. Andrew N. French on the development of chiral hypervalent iodine catalysts for enantioselective α-oxytosylation and on the synthesis of dibenziodonium salts. She pursued her PhD studies in the group of Prof. M. Christina White at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as an NSF Graduate Research Fellow. Her Ph.D. research focused on pioneering the development of site- and chemoselective iron- and manganese-catalyzed C(sp3)–H amination reactions. Shauna’s passion for catalysis next led her to Prof. Eric N. Jacobsen’s lab at Harvard University, where she was an NIH Postdoctoral Fellow. Her research there entailed the use of co-catalysis with chiral dual hydrogen bond donors for the development of efficient chemo- and enantioselective multicomponent reactions. She began her independent career in July 2018 at the University of Rochester, where her research group uses transition metal catalysis to pursue novel strategies to form C–C bonds selectively, with the goal of enabling the efficient construction of topologically complex, sp3-rich organic scaffolds. In her independent career, she has received the Thieme Chemistry Journal Award, NSF CAREER Award, the NIH R35 MIRA, and Eli Lilly Grantee Award.
Host: Shiyu Zhang
