Richard C D Brown's Biography

Richard C D Brown, Professor, University of Southampton

Dr Richard Brown received a first class honours degree in Chemistry from the University of Southampton in 1990. He remained at Southampton for postgraduate studies under the guidance of Professor Kocienski F.R.S., obtaining his Ph.D. in 1994 for his thesis “Furan Oxidation Applied to the Synthesis of Salinomycin”. With a move to the University of California Berkeley in 1994 to take up a NATO postdoctoral fellowship in Professor Clayton Heathcock’s research group, his synthetic efforts switched from complex polyether ionophores to alkaloids, specifically the syntheses of the alkaloids petrosin C and petrosin D. On his return to the UK in 1996, he took up a six-month sabbatical at Pfizer Central Research before being awarded a Royal Society University Research Fellowship to join the faculty at the University of Southampton. He was promoted to Professor in 2010, and he is currently deputy head of Chemistry at the University of Southampton. His research interests revolve around synthetic organic chemistry and its application, and he is author and co-author of >100 journal and book articles. Current projects include the synthesis of natural products, asymmetric synthesis, electroorganic synthesis in flow (with Prof. Derek Pletcher), hybrid reactivators for poisoned acetycholine esterase (with Prof. Rachid Baati, Strasbourg), and the development of molecules that support long-lived hyperpolarised singlet states for MRI (with Prof Malcolm Levitt F.R.S.).