On Oct. 12th 2017, with the invitation of Prof. Tao Ye, Prof. Stephen Clark from University of Glasgow visited our school, giving us a wonderful lecture titled “Total Synthesis of Bioactive Marine Diterpene Natural Products” in meeting room E104.
In this lecture, Prof. Clark showed his synthetic work, especially in synthesis of Cladiellin (Eunicellin) diterpene family. Firstly, he introduced their methodology study on heterocycle synthesis by catalytic ylide formation and [2,3]-rearrangement. In the study, they can control the Z/E selectivity of the double bond formed in the [2,3]-rearrangement by adjusting the metal catalyst. Based on this study, his group synthesized the key skeleton of molecules in Cladiellin (Eunicellin) diterpene family in a several steps. Then they performed a diverse synthesis of bioactive marine diterpene natural products. In the report, He showed the synthetic details and gave us reasonable explanations on the questions occurred in the synthetic study.
After the report, professors and students of our school discussed with Prof. Clark actively. This lecture brought us a big inspiration on our research in synthetic chemistry.
In the end, Dr. Jian-Cheng Fu, the vice president from PHARMARON, afforded the “PHARMARON LECTURE” certification to Prof. Clark. (Written by Jia-Lei Yan; Photoed by Lin-Xing Zhang)
Profile of Prof. Stephen Clark
Prof. Stephen Clark obtained his PhD at the University of Cambridge in 1988. From 1988 to 1990, he worked in the research group of Professor David Evans at Harvard University as a NATO Postdoctoral Research Fellow. He commenced his independent academic career at the University of Nottingham in 1990, where he was promoted to Reader in 1999 and then Professor in 2001. In 2006, he moved to the University of Glasgow as Head of Organic Chemistry and from April 2010 until August 2016 he served as Head of the School of Chemistry at Glasgow. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (Scotland’s National Academy of Science and Letters) in 2009 and is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry. He served as Vice-President of the Organic Division of the Royal Society of Chemistry from 2009 to 2012.
Professor Clark has been the recipient of several awards and prizes for his research work including the Glaxo Wellcome Award for Innovative Organic Chemistry (1996), the Zeneca Award for Chemistry (1997), the Pfizer Academic Award (2001), the Novartis European Young Investigator Award in Chemistry (2004) and, most recently, the Bader Award of the Royal Society of Chemistry (2015).
Professor Clark’s research interests concern the development of novel strategies and synthetic methodology for the construction of complex polycyclic systems and the application of this work to the total synthesis of structurally complex bioactive natural products.
