The Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry announce the 15th Henry J. Shine Lecture series on Apr 21 & 22, 2015.
Public Lecture: Tuesday, Apr 21, 2015 at 7:30 PM in CHEM 049
Taming the Force of Oxidation
Technical Lecture: Wednesday, Apr 22, 2015 at 4:00 PM in CHEM 107
The Functionalization of C-H Bonds
We are pleased to announce that Professor M. Christina White will present this year’s Henry J. Shine Lecture. This annual lecture series was endowed by students, colleagues and friends of Professor Shine and supplemented by a grant from the Plum Foundation.
M. Christina White was born in Athens, Greece where she lived until the age of five. She received her undergraduate degree in biochemistry at Smith College, where she worked with Professor Stuart Rosenfeld in the area of host-guest chemistry. After a brief stint in the biology graduate program at Johns Hopkins University working with Professor Christian Anfinsen, she began her doctoral studies in chemistry under the direction of Professor Gary Posner. During that time, she initiated the hybrid Vitamin D3 analog program in his group.
In 1999, she joined Professor Eric Jacobsen's labs at Harvard University as an NIH postdoctoral fellow. During this time, she developed the first synthetically useful methane monooxygenase (MMO) mimic system for catalytic epoxidations with hydrogen peroxide. Christina began her independent career as a member of the chemistry faculty at Harvard University in July of 2002. She joined the department of chemistry at the University of Illinois in the summer of 2005, where she is currently a Professor of Chemistry. Her group's research interests center around the development of highly selective C—H functionalization methods for streamlining the process of complex molecule synthesis.
She has received numerous awards including the Camille and Henry Dreyfus New Faculty Award (2002), the NSF CAREER Award (2006), Fellow of the UIUC Center for Advanced Study (2006), the Eli Lilly Grantee Award (2007), the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship (2008), the BMS Unrestricted “Freedom to Discover” Grant (2008), the Pfizer Award for Creativity in Organic Chemistry (2008), Amgen Young Investigator Award (2008), Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals New Investigator Award (2008), Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award (2008), AstraZeneca Excellence in Chemistry Award (2008), Abbott Young Investigator Award (2008), Sanofi Aventis "Visions in Chemistry" (2008), Roche Excellence in Chemistry Award (2009),Cope Scholar Award (2009), Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2012), the Royal Society of Chemistry, Merck Award (2013), and Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (2014).
