Highlights

Announcing the Winners of the Inaugural CUNY Junior Faculty Research Award in Science and Engineering

This award, supported by a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation,is designed to advance the research programs of research-intensive, early career, science and engineering faculty at CUNY through boosting their research productivity and accelerating their ability to attract significant external funding. You can read about all 4 winners HERE . We will feature each of them on this page over the coming weeks.

Mark R. Biscoe , Assistant Professor of Chemistry at City College was awarded the 2012 CUNY Junior Faculty Research Award in Science and Engineering to support his research program devoted to the development of simple, general, efficient strategies for the rapid formation of biologically important molecules for application in pharmaceutical manufacturing and drug discovery.

Prior to coming to CCNY in 2009, Dr. Biscoe was a graduate student in the laboratory of Ronald Breslow at Columbia University and an NIH post-doctoral fellow in Stephen L. Buchwald’s lab at MIT. During these crucial formative years studying organic and organometallic chemistry, Dr. Biscoe was already distinguishing himself by an astonishing creativity and scientific rigor in both his research approach and output. Between 2005 and 2008 he published seven oft-cited papers in high impact journals including the Journal of the American Chemical Society, Angewandte Chemie, and Organic Letters.

While at MIT, Dr. Biscoe conducted structural, mechanistic, and synthetic studies on palladium-catalyzed carbon-nitrogen bond-forming reactions. These groundbreaking studies transformed the field and are directly related to his current research project which focuses on developing methods to apply optically-active, configurationally stable organometallic reagents in transition metal-catalyzed cross-coupling reactions to create new single-enantiomer compounds. His lab is also engaged in research to develop new cross-coupling reactions that exploit the unique properties of aqueous and fluorous media. Dr. Biscoe strives to apply “green chemistry” principles to all of his methodology projects by using environmentally benign solvents.

In 2011, Dr. Biscoe published two influential papers, which were then highlighted in Synfacts, a journal dedicated to the consolidation of the most useful and innovative method development research in organic chemistry.  Dr. Biscoe has also received an American Chemical Society Petroleum Research Fund New Investigator Grant, and more recently, an NIH Support of Competitive Research (SCORE) Pilot Project Award to fund his research and his mentoring work with CUNY students.

You can find more stories from the Research Office on our newswire HERE