Professor (Organic Chemistry Dept. - UB)
Born in Balsareny (Barcelona, Spain) in 1957. He studied chemistry at the University of Barcelona, where he did his Doctoral thesis under the supervision of Profs. Fèlix Serratosa and Miquel A. Pericàs. After a post-doctoral stage at the University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, USA) under the supervision of Prof. Amos B. Smith III, in 1988 he returned to the Department of Organic Chemistry of the University of Barcelona as associate professor. In June 2003 he was promoted to full professor at the same university.
Since 2005 he has served as group leader of the Asymmetric Synthesis Group of the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona).
His main research area is organic synthesis. He works on synthetic methodology (Pauson-Khand reactions, asymmetric hydrogenation, chiral ligands, catalytic isomerizations etc.) and the synthesis of biologically active compounds (amino acids, aza-sugars, peptides, protein inhibitors, PROTACs, tetrazines). In all these fields, he has directed 34 doctoral theses and co-authored two hundred fifty publications in international journals.
He is co-founder of Enantia, S.L a spin-off company created in 2003 and devoted to the development of new synthetic processes for pharmaceutical products. In 2017 he received the “Premio a la Excelencia Científica” (Scientific Excellence Award) from the Real Sociedad Española de Química (RSEQ)(Spanish Royal Society of Chemistry).