Scott E. Denmark

About

Scott E. Denmark was born in Lynbrook, NY in 1953. He obtained a S. B. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1975 and a D.Sc. Tech. from the ETH-Zürich under the direction of Albert Eschenmoser in 1980. That same year he was appointed as assistant professor at the University of Illinois and since 1991 has been the Reynold C. Fuson Professor of Chemistry. Professor Denmark's research interests include synthetic organic chemistry, invention of new organic reactions, elucidation of structure-reactivity-selectivity relationships through mechanistic studies, and total synthesis of natural products such as alkaloids, polypropionates, polyenes, and C-aryl glycosides. His group focuses on the origin of stereocontrol in fundamental carbon-carbon and carbon-heteroatom bond forming reactions, and applies these developments to the synthesis of complex molecular structures. The research emphasizes the relationship between structure, reactivity, and stereoselectivity in organo-element systems, particularly involving silicon, phosphorus, tin, sulfur, and lithium compounds. Recent work has concentrated on palladium catalyzed cross-coupling reactions with organofunctional silicon compounds, asymmetric catalysis of carbonyl and olefin addition reactions, and chiral Lewis base activation of Lewis acids. Additionally, his group develops and applies tandem heterodiene cycloadditions for synthesizing complex natural and unnatural nitrogen-containing compounds, and employs…

Research topics

• Artificial Intelligence
• Machine Learning
• Computer Science
• Data Mining
• Chemistry
• Organic chemistry
• Engineering
• Database
• Computational chemistry
• Stereochemistry

Selected publications

• Catalytic, Enantioselective Sulfenofunctionalization of Alkenes: Development and Recent Advances

  Angewandte Chemie International Edition · 2020 · 103 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  The last decade has witnessed a burgeoning of new methods for the enantioselective vicinal difunctionalization of alkenes initiated by electrophilic sulfenyl group transfer. The addition of sulfenium ions to alkenes results in the generation of chiral, non-racemic thiiranium ions. These highly reactive intermediates are susceptible to attack by a myriad of nucleophiles in a stereospecific ring-opening event to afford anti 1,2-sulfenofunctionalized products. The practical application of sulfenium…

  DOI

• Development of a Computer-Guided Workflow for Catalyst Optimization. Descriptor Validation, Subset Selection, and Training Set Analysis

  Journal of the American Chemical Society · 2020 · 98 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  Modern, enantioselective catalyst development is driven largely by empiricism. Although this approach has fostered the introduction of most of the existing synthetic methods, it is inherently limited by the skill, creativity, and chemical intuition of the practitioner. Herein, we present a complementary approach to catalyst optimization in which statistical methods are used at each stage to streamline development. To construct the optimization informatics workflow, a number of critical component…

  DOI

• Demystifying the asymmetry-amplifying, autocatalytic behaviour of the Soai reaction through structural, mechanistic and computational studies

  Nature Chemistry · 2020 · 86 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  DOI

• Machine Learning to Develop Peptide Catalysts─Successes, Limitations, and Opportunities

  ACS Central Science · 2024-02-05 · 19 citations

  articleOpen accessCorresponding

  Peptides have been established as modular catalysts for various transformations. Still, the vast number of potential amino acid building blocks renders the identification of peptides with desired catalytic activity challenging. Here, we develop a machine-learning workflow for the optimization of peptide catalysts. First─in a hypothetical competition─we challenged our workflow to identify peptide catalysts for the conjugate addition reaction of aldehydes to nitroolefins and compared the performan…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Chemoinformatic Catalyst Selection Methods for the Optimization of Copper–Bis(oxazoline)-Mediated, Asymmetric, Vinylogous Mukaiyama Aldol Reactions

  ACS Catalysis · 2024-02-06 · 14 citations

  articleSenior authorCorresponding

  A catalyst selection method for the optimization of an asymmetric, vinylogous Mukaiyama aldol reaction is described. A large library of commercially available and synthetically accessible copper–bis(oxazoline) catalysts was constructed in silico. Conformer-dependent, grid-based descriptors were calculated for each catalyst, defining a chemical feature space suitable for machine learning. Selection of a diverse subset of catalyst space produced an initial training set of 26 new bis(oxazoline) lig…

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• Catalytic, Enantioselective Dihalogenation of Alkenes

  NSF · $490k · 2017–2020

• Asymmetric Nucleophilic Catalysis with Chiral Lewis Bases

  NSF · $617k · 2004–2007

• Asymmetric Catalysis in Main Group Chemistry

  NIH · $2.4M · 2010–2018

Frequent coauthors

• Robert A. Stavenger

  GlaxoSmithKline (United States)

  31 shared

• Andrew F. Zahrt

  University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  30 shared

• Jeremy Henle

  26 shared

• Jesse L. Panger

  University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  23 shared

• Tyler W. Wilson

  22 shared

• Ken‐Tsung Wong

  National Taiwan University

  22 shared

• Anastassia Matviitsuk

  Janssen (Belgium)

  21 shared

• Gregory L. Beutner

  The Bristol-Myers Squibb Children's Hospital

  21 shared

Labs

• Denmark GroupPI

Awards & honors

• Paracelsus Prize (Swiss Chemical Society), 2020
• Ryoji Noyori Prize (Society of Synthetic Organic Chemistry,…
• EROS 2019 Best Reagent of the Year Award, 2019
• The Journal of Organic Chemistry Outstanding Publication of…
• National Academy of Sciences, Member, 2018

Similar researchers at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

• Catherine J. Murphyh-112
• Eric Oldfieldh-100
• Stephan Linkh-76