CONGRATULATIONS TO PROFESSOR DAVID CRICH ON RECEIVING THE 2018 ROY L. WHISTLER AWARD IN CARBOHYDRATE CHEMISTRY!
Professor David Crich, Schaap Professor of Organic Chemistry at Wayne State University in Detroit, has received the 2018 Roy L. Whistler Award in Carbohydrate Chemistry for his work in the development of new chemistries for oligosaccharide synthesis. Professor Crich is a native of Chesterfield, England and graduate of the University of Surrey. He earned his B.Sc. in Chemistry with French in 1981. He then joined the group of Sir Derek Barton at the Institut de Chimie des Substances Naturelles (ICSN) in Gif sur Yvette, France. Under Barton he 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 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 amino acids, and carbohydrate chemistry, Crich moved to the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) where he worked for seventeen years, rising to the rank of Liberal Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of Organic Chemistry. In 2007, Crich relocated to Wayne State University as the Schaap Professor of Chemistry, 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 antibiotics, physical organic chemistry, and oligosaccharide synthesis. He has published more than 380 papers covering 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.
Professor Crich received his award at the International Carbohydrate Symposium, which was held in Lisbon, Portugal July 15-19, 2018.
