David Crich
David Crich – Wayne State University (US)
David Crich was born and raised in Chesterfield, England. He graduated from the University of Surrey with a B.Sc. in Chemistry with French in 1981 before joining the group of Sir Derek Barton at the Institut de Chimie des Substances Naturelles (ICSN) in Gif sur Yvette, France. Under Barton he learned the rudiments of free radical chemistry and was responsible for the development of the Barton decarboxylation reaction, for which he was awarded the degree of Docteur ès Sciences by the Université de Paris XI (Orsay) in 1984. After a further year at the ICSN as postdoc with Barton and Potier he took up a “new blood” lectureship in chemistry in the Christopher Ingold Laboratories of University College London. After five years at UCL working in the areas of diastereoselective free radical chemistry, acyl radical chemistry, enantioselective synthesis of ?-disubstituted amino acids, and carbohydrate chemistry, Crich moved to the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) where he stayed seventeen years, rising to the rank of Liberal Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of Organic Chemistry. Work at UIC focused on the development of new stereo controlled methods for glycosidic bond formation and their application in oligosaccharide synthesis, the chemistry of free radicals and of alkene radical cations, and the development of environmentally benign reagents for organic synthesis. In 2007 Crich relocated to Wayne State University in Detroit as the Schaap Professor of Chemisty, before taking up the position of Director of the ICSN in Gif-sur-Yvette in 2009. Crich returned to Wayne State as the Schaap Professor in 2011 and leads a group working in the areas of glycochemistry, organic reactivity and antibiotic chemistry. The underlying theme of much of Crich’s work is the symbiosis of mechanism and methodology/synthesis with careful physical organic studies underpinning much of the synthetic work to appear from his laboratory. His more than 320 published papers cover areas as diverse as the total synthesis of alkaloids, the development of new glycosylation methods, catalysis of radical reactions, and improved methods for peptide synthesis.
http://www.chem.wayne.edu/faculty/crich/