About the speaker:

Bio:

Dr. Alexander Spokoyny was born and spent his childhood and teenage years in Moscow, Russia. After his family immigrated to United States in 2001, Alex attended UCLA, where he was introduced to the area of boron cluster chemistry working as an undergraduate researcher in the laboratory of Prof. M. Frederick Hawthorne. He continued his graduate chemistry education at Northwestern University under the guidance of Prof. Chad A. Mirkin. At Northwestern, Alex developed new materials, devices, and fundamentally new classes of ligand platforms based on organomimetic carborane clusters. Upon receiving his Ph.D. in inorganic chemistry in 2011, Alex decided to move further east, where he was an NIH Post-Doctoral Fellow working in the laboratories of Profs. Stephen L. Buchwald and Bradley L. Pentelute at MIT. There his research interests involved the development of new bioconjugation strategies for peptides and proteins and regulation of protein-protein interactions. Alex has been a faculty at UCLA since 2014.

Research Interests:

His research is devoted towards establishing new synthetic avenues, structural understanding, and applications for inorganic and organomimetic clusters and assemblies. He focuses on the development of an extensive and versatile synthetic toolbox, allowing for the functionalization of various 3D cluster motifs including polyhedral boranes and carboranes.

See the Spokoyny Group Website.