About the Speaker:

Bio:

Eric was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada in 1988 and grew up nearby in Kingston. He ventured to the United States to pursue a BSc at Harvey Mudd College and graduated in 2010. Escaping the southern California heat, Eric moved to Columbia University for his PhD studies with Tristan Lambert, where he developed new reagents and catalysts for organic synthesis based on aromatic ions. After a successful defense in 2015, he stayed on the East Coast to perform postdoctoral research at Princeton University under the guidance of David MacMillan. As an NIH postdoctoral fellow, Eric developed asymmetric transformations using alcohols as alkylating agents. He began his independent career in 2019 at Penn State University, where he is currently an Assistant Professor of Chemistry.

Research:

Our group is primarily interested in addressing important challenges in synthetic organic chemistry. In particular, we will seek new, general strategies to prepare complex, biologically active compounds or substructures from the simplest possible feedstocks. This work involves designing new reactions, catalysts, and reagents, and is driven by mechanistic hypotheses and investigations. Furthermore, we seek to harness new reactivity principles in organic chemistry to develop enabling tools for chemical biology, identify scalable approaches to renewable organic feedstocks, and prepare organic polymers with improved functionality.