Research in Synthetic Organic Chemistry

My name is Professor Varinder Aggarwal, I'm Professor of Organic Chemistry, and I teach organic chemistry at the undergraduate level. I run a team of postgraduates and postdoctoral workers in synthetic organic chemistry. So every day, I will come into the lab and speak with my team and see how things are going, see what experiments they've done, what successes they've had and what problems they've had. Together we'll try and come up with some solutions to those problems that they've encountered. I'll also spend part of my day trying to write up those experiments and prepare publications and that's an important part of what we do so we can tell the world about some of the achievements we've made. I work with a large international team of students and postdocs from all over the world. We basically work on organic synthesis which is all about making complicated molecules, complex structures, with precise shape and functionality from simple building blocks. What we do is we put these building blocks together and then activate them in some way so that they are attracted to each other and when they're attracted to each other, bonds can form between them and then we take that and then we do it again, add another building block and so on. It's a bit like trying to construct the Taj Mahal - it's got minarets and domes and facades and courtyards. And our goal is to try and make those molecules in as short a number of steps as possible because that uses up less resources, creates less waste and is much more efficient. Outside the lab, a lot of people are interested in creating molecules with precise shape and functionality. The whole pharmaceutical industry, the whole agrochemical industry is based on that. They have to target enzymes and find molecules that will interact with enzymes to stop bad processes happening or to kick-start processes that are not happening. We provide them the tools that enable them to go away and create those molecules and without those tools, we would not have the industries that we have today - we wouldn't have the healthcare that we have today, we wouldn't have the agrochemical industry - that's helping to feed the world - that we have today.