Professor Karl J. Hale

March 2011 The National Science Council (NSC) of Taiwan bestows on Karl Hale its prestigious 2011 Visiting Lectureship of the NSC Chemistry Research Promotion Centre. (http://www.ch.qub.ac.uk/news/news-110302.html) This is a major international research honour that is bestowed annually on eminent foreign chemists who live outside of Taiwan. According to Professor Ying-Chih Lin, the Director of the NSC Chemistry Research Promotion Center that bestows the Award, it is only “awarded very selectively to chemists who are highly recognised worldwide”. The Hale group salutes the fine chemists of Taiwan for so generously bestowing this great honour on our leader. Previous recipients of this named lectureship include Professor Ei-ichi Negishi, the 2010 Nobel Prize winner in Organic Chemistry. Karl will begin his Taiwan Universities lecture tour in September 2011 and will be hosted by the very well regarded Taiwanese organic chemist, Professor Kwunmin Chen.

December 2010 Karl Hale, Soraya Manaviazar and Amandine Lefranc publish their special invited communication paper entitled: ”Enantioselective Formal Total Synthesis of the Dendrobatidae Frog Toxin, (+)-Pumiliotoxin B, Via O-Directed Alkyne Free Radical Hydrostannation” in the special Harry Wasserman 90th Birthday issue of Tetrahedron Letters. Not only does this paper honour the great American organic chemist, Harry Wasserman, on the occasion of his 90th Birthday, it also reports the first successful application of the group’s O-directed alkyne free radical hydrostannation process in natural product total synthesis. Well done to Soraya for finishing yet another complex and synthetically challenging natural product target to extremely high standards!

November 2010 Karl begins his JSPS Lecture Tour of Japan hosted by the eminent and leading Japanese Organic Chemist, Professor Toshiaki Sunazuka of the Kitasato University. Karl’s lecture tour will take him to 9 top Japanese Research Universities and most of the leading pharmaceutical companies of Japan, where he will give a total of 16 lectures.

August 2010 Karl Hale receives the news that he has been awarded a prestigious and highly regarded Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Invitation Research Fellowship for 2010 for the group’s synthetic and chemical biology achievements over the past two decades.

July 2010 Karl Hale is elected as a Fellow of the Institute of Chemistry of Ireland (ICI) and is concurrently appointed to its Council. Karl was already a Fellow of the Royal of the Society of Chemistry.

June 2010 Mr Jakub Flasz is selected by scientists at Roche Basel to participate in their prestigious annual Roche Continents programme which is allied with and takes place alongside the Salzburg Music Festival. This is a major cross-European honour that only the most academically promising students compete for and win. Jakub is the first Queen’s University of Belfast Chemistry Student to be selected to participate in this prestigious event. The Hale group congratulates and salutes Jakub for his achievement.

May 2010 Two new Ph.D students, Mr Milosz Grabski and Mr Maciej Maczka, join the Hale group from the Technical University of Silesia.

May 2010 Former Hale group Ph.D student, Dr Jonathan George (1st Class Honours in Chemistry from Oxford University; Ph.D in Synthetic Organic Chemistry from Hale Group in 2007; Postdoctoral Fellow in Chemistry with Prof. Sir Jack Baldwin FRS and Dr Robert Adlington at Oxford University) takes up a Lectureship in Organic Chemistry at the University of Adelaide in Australia.

April 2010 Karl Hale, Soraya Manaviazar and Jonathan George publish their invited Feature Article entitled: “Total Synthesis of (+)-A83586C, (+)-Kettapeptn, and (+)-Azinothricin: Powerful New Inhibitors of b-Catenin/TCF4- and E2F-Mediated Gene Transcription” in the April issue of Chem Comm. This is a major 21 page article that documents the Hale group’s two decade long synthetic chemistry and chemical biology effort on these molecules. It includes a detailed discussion of the first and second generation synthetic approaches to this family of complex natural products, and it also presents many interesting new mechanistic insights into how these molecules and their analogues function as antitumour drugs. The article can be found at:
http://pubs.rsc.org/en/Content/ArticleLanding/2010/CC/c000603c

March 2010 Karl Hale and Soraya Manaviazar publish their lengthy review article entitled: “New Approaches to the Total Synthesis of the Bryostatin Antitumor Macrolides” in Chemistry – An Asian Journal. The article also includes many previously unpublished results from the Hale group about their efforts on the formal total synthesis of bryostatin 7. A copy of the article can be found at:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/asia.200900634/abstract

August 2009 Karl is invited by the American Chemical Society New Jersey Section to deliver a plenary lecture at its “A Celebration of Organic Synthesis” Symposium to mark the 65th Birthday of Karl’s former mentor at Penn, Professor Amos B. Smith III.

May 2009 New Ph.D student, Mr Jakub Flasz, joins Hale group from the Technical University of Silesia.

November 2007  From 19-30 November, Karl will be doing his main 2007 GDCH Liebig Lectureship Tour at 10 top Universities within Germany; see his section on Forthcoming Lectures for more details of the places he will be visiting.

October 2007 Karl and other QUB Chemistry Colleagues host Professor Jim Marshall of the University of Virginia for his RSC Centenary Lecture here in Belfast.

September 2007 Karl gives the first of his invited 2007 GDCh Liebig Lectureship lectures at the GDCh Biannual Chemistry Forum in Ulm.

August 2007  Dr Mathias Domostoj (Hale group Ph.D 2005, and former DAAD Alexander von Humboldt Fellow with Prof Alois Fürstner at MPI, Mulheim) takes up a research position with Argenta Discovery. Prior to this, he had worked at Serono in Switzerland.

August 2007  Dr Soraya Manaviazar takes on the key administrative role of Editorial Assistant for the QUB Organic Letters Editorial Office in addition to her experimental and teaching duties.

August 2007  Dr Soraya Manaviazar presents an invited poster on the group’s and her own Azinothricin total synthesis work at BMOS-12 Brazil.

August 2007  Karl gives two big invited conference lectures at ICCA-X in Nashville USA and at BMOS-12 in Itapema Brazil.

August 2007  Karl is awarded the 2007 Liebig Lectureship of the German Chemical Society; Karl and the group celebrate this major external international Chemical Society recognition of the group’s research work.

June 2007  The Hale group successfully completes its move over to Queen’s Belfast and is back up and running within 2 weeks.   Special thanks to Dr Soraya Manaviazar and all the group for their fantastic efforts on bringing off this logistical masterpiece which involved not only a land but also a sea crossing!

May 2007   Dr Yi Li presents his poster on “The asymmetric total synthesis of (+)-eremantholide A” at the Eisai Annual Symposium “Structure, Biology and Disease” held at Eisai London Laboratories in University College London.

April 2007  Mr Jonathan George (1st Class Honours in Chemistry from Oxford University, and currently a Postdoctoral Fellow with Prof. Sir Jack Baldwin FRS and Dr Robert Adlington at Oxford University) successfully passes his Ph.D after being examined by Professor Douglas W. Young (University of Sussex) and Dr Peter Wyatt (QMW University of London).

April 2007   Dr Amarjit Kaur gets her a JACS communication from some her Ph.D work in India (see: JACS  129, 2007, 4506).

March 2007  Dr Yi Li presents an invited lecture at the Spring American Chemical Society meeting in Chicago on “The asymmetric total synthesis of (+)-eremantholide A”. Good job, Yi.

March 2007  Dr Amarjit Kaur (1st Class Honours and Ph.D in Chemistry from Panjab University in India) joins the Hale group on a highly prestigious Indian Government Boyscast Fellowship. Congratulations to Dr Kaur on receiving this highly competitive Research Fellowship.

March 2007   Mr Marcus Walters (1st Class Honours in Chemistry from UCL, who is currently working for the Law Firm, Burges Salmon in Bristol) successfully passes his Ph.D after being examined by Dr Elizabeth Tyrrell (University of Kingston) and Dr Howard Carless (Birkbeck College, University of London).

February 2007  Dr Yi Li  (ex-postdoc with Prof. AGM Barrett FRS at Imperial College) has his paper on the asymmetric total synthesis of (+)-eremantholide A appear in Organic Letters (see Org. Lett. 9, 2007, 1267). Well done, Yi!