Karl Barry Sharpless

Karl Barry Sharpless (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States, April 28, 1941) is an American chemist and university professor who has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry twice, the first in 2001 for his work in click chemistry theory, and the second in 2022 — together with Carolyn Bertozzi and Morten Meldal — for the implementation of said technique.

Biography

She studied chemistry at Friends' Central School , where he received his BA in 1959. He later received his Ph.D. in 1968 from Stanford University, continuing his postdoctoral work at Stanford University. He was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and since 1990 has been a professor of chemistry at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California.

Scientific research

In 2001 he was awarded half the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for having managed to obtain optically pure chiral molecules through the oxidation reaction with enantioselective catalysts. The award was shared with two other researchers, William S. Knowles and Ryoji Noyori, for the same achievement using hydrogenation.