Eric Larsen joins us just after receiving his Ph.D. from the lab of Prof. Christopher Bielawski at UNIST. His doctoral work focused on the supramolecular behavior of curved polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, as well as the synthesis of pyrophoric beryllium compounds. Congratulations, and welcome aboard!
Education:
Ph.D. - Chemistry - Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST), South Korea
B.S. - Biochemistry - The University of Texas at Austin, TX, USA
Business Foundations Program - The University of Texas at Austin, TX, USA
Eric Larsen:
"Modern organic synthesis is a great driver of things, and yet, for most reactions, the traditional solution-phase approach offers little in terms of being able to actively discriminate between substrates with similar features and functionality. This behavior is a key feature of enzymatic catalysis and highlights the need to develop non-conventional systems that can enable synthetic transformations to occur with substrate selectivity. In this sense, nanoparticles decorated with known catalysts offer a distinct advantage over solution-based methods in that selectivity can be achieved by controlling the "type" of monolayer coverage (e.g., terminally exposed anionic vs. cationic groups), which collectively act as an effective substrate-gate. This work is currently being explored in Prof. Grzybowski's lab and has already provided the scientific community with an excellent platform to mimic enzyme-like behavior. Given the large variety of known synthetic transformations that would benefit from this approach, I am both eager and excited to expand upon this research with Prof. Grzybowski and his team."
