About the Speaker:

Kostya was born in Tyumen, West Siberia, Russia, in 1984. He obtained his B.S. degree in 2006 from Tyumen State University.

After graduation, he moved to Moscow, Russia, where he held a position of Research Scientist in Chemical Diversity Research Institute (CDI, a subsidiary of ChemDiv, a contract research organization with headquarters in San Diego, CA). He worked on projects for Novartis, Merck, Abbott, Eli Lilly, and others, developing essential synthetic strategies towards the clients’ target compounds, including the synthesis of libraries of enantiopure organic compounds.

Kostya joined the graduate program at the Lomonosov Moscow State University in 2008. He was working under Professor Alexander Kurkin and Professor Marina Yurovskaya on biologically active heterocyclic compounds and obtained his Ph.D. degree in 2012.

Shortly after receiving a Ph.D. degree, he was invited to join the research group of Professor Valentin Rodionov (currently at Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH) at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Saudi Arabia, as a Postdoctoral Fellow. At KAUST, he developed new catalysts based on amphiphilic polymers, including organo- and metal complex catalysts.

In 2015, Kostya joined the research group of Professor Richard Schrock (Nobel Prize 2005) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as a Postdoctoral Associate. During his career at MIT, he developed a class of molybdenum complexes that have shown unprecedented activity for the cross-metathesis of electron-deficient olefins (halogen and trifluoromethyl substituted alkenes) with unreactive substrates (polysubstituted olefins). Additionally, he established a synthetic route to molybdenum oxo alkylidene complexes, an elusive class of compounds for the last 35 years, proposed in classical olefin metathesis systems.

He joined the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Florida International University in 2018 as an Assistant Professor in Organic chemistry.

Check out his group website.