Title of Lecture: New Dimension of Acid and Base Catalysis
Speaker: Shu Kobayashi
Time: Tuesday, September 11, 2012. 4:00PM
Place: No. 101 Lecture Hall, the Second Chmistry Building, LZU
Introduction to the speaker:
Prof. Shu Kobayashi received his PhD degree from the University of Tokyo in 1988 working under the direction of Prof. T. Mukaiyama. Following an initial period as Assistant Professor, he was promoted to Lecturer (1991) then Associate Professor (1992) at the Science University of Tokyo. In 1998, he moved to the Graduate School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, The University of Tokyo, as full Professor. In April 2007, he was appointed to his current position as full Professor in the Department of Chemistry, School of Science, The University of Tokyo. He has held various visiting professorships, including the Universite Louis Pasteur, Strasbourg (1993), Kyoto University (1995), Nijmegen University (1996), Philipps-University of Marburg (1997), and Universite Paris-Sud, Orsay (2011). Professor Kobayashi is also Director of the ERATO project of the Japan Science Agency (JST, 2003-2009), and Director of the NEDO project of the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, Japan (2009 to the present).
He has held numerous named lectureships and is a recipient of many prestigious awards, including the Chemical Society of Japan ward for Young Chemists (1991), Teijin Award in Synthetic Organic Chemistry (1992), Ciba-Geigy research Foundation Award (1994), Springer Award in Organometallic Chemistry (1997), IBM science Award (2001), Mitsui Chemical Catalysis Science Award (2005), JSPS Prize (2005), and the Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award (2006). His research covers (a) organic reactions in water; (b) novel chiral catalysts; (c) microencapsulated catalysts; (d) organic reactions in microreactors; (e) synthesis of antimalarial alkaloids, and (f) total synthesis of biologically active compounds.
