Organic and bioorganic chemistry. Exquisitely selective chemical catalysts and reagents are needed for the modification and functional perturbation of molecules in complex contexts, such as in biological and environmental samples. Since chemists have traditionally been concerned with the transformation of a single, pure starting material into a product, few reagents are capable of selectively functionalizing one compound in a mixture, especially if similar functional groups are present among the starting compounds. My lab will use tools from synthetic chemistry and molecular biology to develop new classes of catalysts that selectively functionalize one component of a mixture and discriminate among multiple instances of a functional group
