Event Details

Join Varinder Aggarwal (University of Bristol) for their RSC Prize Lecture on their academic career and their work on sulfur ylide. Also available on Teams.

Abstract:

In this lecture, I will discuss my academic journey from the start of my career to where we are now, and highlight some of the twists and turns that have influenced the direction of our work.

I will begin with our work on sulfur ylide reactions to make epoxides, and how we were able to turn this normally stoichiometric process into a catalytic and asymmetric process. I'll also discuss how our third-generation sulfides can be employed in asymmetric epoxidation, not just by us, but how it's been scaled up in industry as well.

The reaction of sulfur ylides with boron reagents was also known, but only for polymerization reactions. We were interested to see if we could use this chemistry with boron reagents for single and then iterative homologation. Some of this chemistry worked, but it was found to be quite limited: only boranes worked and after one homologation, complications arose from having different groups on boron. The solution was to find a different reagent that had all the features of the sulfur ylide, but which was much more reactive and could react with boronic esters. This has led to our current work on iterative homologation of boronic esters and their applications in synthesis which will be the main focus of my lecture.

For details on joining Teams, please contact the event organiser.