The Secret Lives of Enzymes
About the speaker
Prof. K. Barry Sharpless is the W. M. Keck Professor of Chemistry at the Scripps Research Institute. Since graduating with a PhD in chemistry from Stanford University in 1968, he had taught in Stanford and MIT. He joined the Scripps Research Institute in 1990 and has been a member of the Skaggs Institute for Chemical Biology since 1996.
Prof. Sharpless was elected member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1984. He was the recipient of the King Faisal Award for Science in 1985 and the Harvey Science and Technology Award from Israel Institute of Technology in 1988. In 1995, he received honorary doctorates from Stockholm’s Royal Institute of Technology and the Technical University of Munich. He is an honorary doctorate at the 15th Congregation of HKUST (2007) in recognition of his academic achievements.
He received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2001 for his work on chirally catalysed oxidation reactions. His discovery of epoxidation was identified by many scientists as “the most important in the field of synthesis during the past few decades”. One of his recent creations is click chemistry, a set of powerful and selective reactions for the rapid synthesis of new compounds.
