Professor Martin Banwell is the 2014 Liversidge Lecturer and Inaugural Medalist of the Royal Society of New South Wales. He presented his lecture at The University of Sydney on the 20th of November 2014.

The Liversidge Research Lecture 2014

"Recent Studies on the Total Synthesis of Natural Products and Related Systems"

Professor Martin Banwell

A diverse range of biologically active natural products is being targeted for synthesis in our laboratories. The motivations for undertaking such work are three-fold: (a) to develop structure-activity relationship (SAR) profiles for the relevant class, (b) to develop new synthetic methodologies and (c) sometimes to establish the true structure of the natural product.1 Of course, such pursuits can become all the more fascinating when completely unexpected processes are uncovered. In this presentation, examples of all of these possibilities will be presented.

M. G. Banwell, Tetrahedron, 2008, 64, 4669.

Martin BANWELL was born and educated in New Zealand. In 1979 he completed his PhD in organic chemistry at the Victoria University of Wellington where he worked under the supervision of Brian Halton. After a post-Doctoral period with Leo Paquette at the Ohio State University he took up a Senior Teaching Fellowship at the University of Adelaide in South Australia. In 1982 Banwell moved to a Lectureship at the University of Auckland in New Zealand and then to an equivalent position at the University of Melbourne in 1986. He was promoted to a Readership in Organic Chemistry at the same institution in 1993. In 1995 he moved to the Research School of Chemistry (RSC) at the Australian National University as Senior Fellow. In 1999 he was appointed Professor of Chemistry and served as Director of the RSC from the beginning of 2008 until mid-2013.

Professor Banwell's research interests are in the area of synthetic organic chemistry, particularly the development of new methodologies and their application to the total synthesis of biologically active natural products. He is the author or co-author of some three hundred journal articles in this broad area. A particular emphasis has been the exploitation of strained organic compounds and the products of whole-cell biotransformations for such purposes. In recognition of his work, Professor Banwell has received a number of awards including the Rennie and Birch Medals of the Royal Australian Chemical Institute. In 2003 he received the Royal Society of Chemistry (UK) Award in Synthetic Organic Chemistry and was elected to Fellowship of the Australian Academy of Science in the following year.