Stephen G. Davies

Biography

  Stephen Graham "Steve" Davies (born 24 February 1950) is a British chemist and the Waynflete Professor of Chemistry at the University of Oxford. Davies obtained his BA in 1973 from New College, Oxford and his D.Phil, in 1975 under the supervision of Gordon H. Whitham. He subsequently held an ICI Postdoctoral Fellowship working with Malcolm Green (1975-1977) and a NATO Fellowship working with Derek Barton (1977-1978) before joining the CNRS at Gif-sur-Yvette as Attaché de Recherche working with Hugh Felkin. In 1980 he returned to Oxford to take up a University Lectureship in Chemistry.  He also founded Oxford Diversity Ltd (a combinatorial chemistry company). In 2003 he founded VASTox (Value Added Screening Technology Oxford) a zebrafish screening company. It floated on AIM in 2004 and has since acquired Dainolabs (zebrafish) and Dextra (a carbohydrate chemistry company) as well as the assets of MNL Pharma. In 2009 the zebrafish screening operations was acquired by Evotec for £0.5 Million.[8] In 1996, he became Professor of Chemistry[3] and in 2006, Waynflete Professor of Chemistry. Davies is founder and editor-in-chief for Tetrahedron: Asymmetry. Davies along with Malcolm Green and Michael Mingos have compiled a set of rules that summarize where nucleophilic additions will occur on pi ligands.

Research Interest

  Davies research is concerned with investigations into a wide variety of topics including the development of new synthetic methodology, catalysis, mechanistic investigations, total synthesis and collaborative projects in medicinal chemistry, this includes  new applications for the conjugate addition of enantiopure lithium amides, development of kinetic resolution processes for the preparation of functionalised molecular building blocks, new methods for nucleophilic fluorination, methodology for the chemoselective functionalisation of unsaturated amines at the olefin (rather than the nitrogen atom), and application of these methodologies to the total synthesis of natural products of biological significance (including pyrrolidines, piperidines, tropanes, pyrrolizidines, and imino- and aminosugars).