Roopender Kumar
Dr. Roopender Kumar
Assistant Professor/Lecturer
Department of Chemistry
University College London
Biography
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. After that, RK joined Professor Cristina Nevado’s lab at the University of Zürich, where he earned his PhD in September 2017. During his dissertation study, RK designed and developed a novel class of pincer-ligands to stabilise metastable gold intermediates, allowing hitherto difficult mechanistic investigations and the production of new gold-based OLED materials. He began his postdoctoral studies as an SNSF (Swiss National Science Foundation) postdoctoral scholar with Professor Matthew Gaunt at the University of Cambridge in January 2018. At Cambridge, RK led a team that 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.