Modhu Sudan Maji

Biography

Assistant Professor, Chemistry Department, IIt, Kharagpur.

Research Interest

1) Dual Catalysis & Asymmetric Synthesis: Our research is mainly focused on catalysis to develop new reaction methods. To this end, we are interested to study both transition metal catalysis and organo-catalysis to achieve new reactions in both asymmetric and racemic form. Besides mono catalysis, multi catalysis (dual catalysis) is another major topic in our laboratory. Initially we are working on dual catalysis by merging Lewis acid catalysis (to generate electrophiles) with Cu- or amine catalysis (to generate nucleophiles). Chiral ligands such as N-heterocyclic carbenes, Box, pyBox and phosphines will be used along with a suitable Cu-salt to achieve enantioselectivity. With the success of these methodologies, valuable precursors can be synthesized in a very efficient way. 2) Asymmetric Synthesis: Apart from the above mentioned asymmetric catalysis, auxiliary based asymmetric synthesis is another topic in our laboratory. Here sulfinyl imines are our auxiliary based chiral electrophiles. Thus highly useful structurally diverse chiral amines will be prepared in comparatively short reaction sequences by designing some attractive nucleophiles. Chiral amines are key structural motif and wide spread in many synthetic drugs, natural products and medicinally important molecules. We are also working on the total synthesis of few selective class of bio-active natural products by designing suitable methodologies based on N-sulfinyl imines 3) C-H-Bond Functionalization: In the myriad of transitional metal catalyzed reactions, C-H bond functionalizations is currently one of the frontier fields in the organic synthesis. A rapid development in this topic has been achieved during last few years and many powerful synthetic methods have been reported in the literature. Being very ubiquitous in most of the organic molecules, selective C-H bond functionalization is highly important as that can lead to the access of the functionalized compounds directly from the readily available precursors and hence save both cost as well as time.