Roopender Kumar
Dr. Roopender Kumar
Assistant Professor/Lecturer
Department of Chemistry
University College London
Roopender was born and raised in a small farm-village in Northern India (Hiranwara, Shamli District, UP). He received master’s degree in organic chemistry from the University of Delhi and worked on his master’s thesis with Professor Hans-Ulrich Reissig at the Free University Berlin on a multicomponent reaction to access new heterocyclic compounds. He subsequently moved to Switzerland to pursue doctoral research at the University of Zürich, completing his PhD in the end of 2017. During his doctoral studies, RK focused on the design and development of a novel class of pincer ligands capable of stabilising metastable gold intermediates. This work enabled previously challenging mechanistic investigations and led to the development of new gold based OLED materials. In January 2018, RK began his postdoctoral research at the University of Cambridge as a Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) postdoctoral fellow. In January 2018, RK began his postdoctoral research at the University of Cambridge as a Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) postdoctoral fellow. At Cambridge, RK discovered and developed a practical and general approach, Carbonyl Alkylative Amination (CAA), for synthesising alkyl amines. He joined the Department of Chemistry at University College London as an Organic Chemistry and Chemical Biology lecturer in January 2022.