BIO
Dr. Naveen Gupta is an ADAGIO fellow at the University of Bordeaux (IECB/CBMN) under a Marie Sklodowska-Curie COFUND grant. His research focuses on Asymmetric Catalysis with Bioinspired Helical Foldamer. Prior to joining the fellowship, he worked in the Team of Prof. Guichard at IECB since October 2022 in ANR funded project. He earned his doctoral degree in Chemistry from the Central Salt and Marine Chemicals Research Institute (CSIR-CSMCRI, INDIA) in 2018, having been awarded a PhD grant (INSPIRE-Fellowship) from the Department of Science and Technology (India), under the supervision of Prof. Noor ul-Hasan Khan. His thesis mainly focused on Homogeneous and Heterogeneous catalysis for the C-C Bond transformation reactions. After his PhD, he worked as a Research Associate in the same lab, where he was involved with some industrial projects and mentored 1st year doctoral students. In 2019, he moved to Nanjing University for 6 months for his post-doctoral studies, where he worked on the isolable stable radicals and synthesis of novel non-innocent ligands and their redox activity. Later, he moved to the University of Warsaw, Poland in 2019 for 2.5 years, working under the supervision of Dr. hab Karolina Pulka-Ziach, who is an assistant professor at the University of Warsaw, Department of Chemistry. He worked on Alpha-helicomimetic foldamers - synthesis, self-assembly, and molecular recognition, focusing on the synthesis of Guanidinium based foldamers and their binding activity with anions.
PROJECT
Organocatalysis has emerged as a sustainable alternative to more traditional methods involving toxic or rare metals. While organocatalysis has proven invaluable in the synthesis of the pharmaceutical intermediates, there are still challenges associated to its development such as low reaction rate and turnover, necessitating higher catalyst loading. In contrast, enzymes stand out as efficient catalysts, demanding minimal catalyst loading and employing a dual activation mechanism. The ability to synthesize artificial sequence-based oligomers that fold with high fidelity (i.e. foldamers) raises new prospects for mimicking biopolymers and designing molecules with emergent functions tailored to various applications, including catalysis.
The focus of our project centers on the development of new generation of H-bond-donor catalysts by exploiting the chiral microenvironment of bioinspired helices (foldamers) to catalyze molecular transformations, specifically the formation of C-C bonds. This collaborative initiative involves two laboratories at Univ. Bordeaux (Guichard group) and UPV/EHU in San Sebastian (Asymmetric Catalysis and Chemical Synthesis Research Group) with a distinctive complementarity. Our primary objective is to capitalize on early reported results from the two groups and to expand further the applicative scope of chiral oligourea helices to catalyze more challenging asymmetric transformations through variations of both nucleophiles and electrophiles while maintaining a low catalyst loading. Particular emphasis will be placed on conducting sequence-activity relationship studies to better optimize the performance.
