Biography

Professor Melanie Sanford received her B.S. and M.S. degrees at Yale University where she carried out undergraduate research in the laboratory of Professor Robert Crabtree. She pursued graduate studies at the California Institute of Technology working with Professor Robert Grubbs, where she investigated the mechanism of ruthenium-catalyzed olefin metathesis reactions. Following postdoctoral work at Princeton University with Professor John Groves, she joined the faculty at the University of Michigan in the summer of 2003 as an Assistant Professor of chemistry. In spring 2007 she was promoted to her current position of Associate Professor of chemistry. Professor Sanford has been recognized with a number of awards, including a Camille and Henry Dreyfus New Faculty Award, a Beckman Young Investigator Award, a Research Corporation Cottrell Scholar Award, and a Presidential Early Career Award in Sciences and Engineering, and has also been named an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellow. In addition, she has received young investigator awards from a number of pharmaceutical companies, including Boehringer Ingelheim, Amgen, Eli Lilly, Bristol Myers Squibb, AstraZeneca, Abbott, GlaxoSmithKline, and Roche. In 2008 she received an Arthur Cope Scholar Award from the American Chemical Society, in 2009 she was the recipient of the BASF catalysis award, and in 2010 she received the National Fresenius Award from the National Chemistry Honor Society and the ACS. Research in the Sanford group focuses broadly on the development and mechanistic study of new transition metal catalyzed reactions for applications in organic synthesis. More specifically, the group is working to develop a diverse set of transformations for the direct conversion of unactivated carbon-hydrogen bonds into new functional groups with high levels of chemo-, regio-, and stereoselectivity.