Organic Synthesis with Rearrangements: Adventures in Total Synthesis

Over the past years, our group has been interested in the exploration of unusual rearrangements in order to streamline access to useful building blocks.
Thus, we have investigated the use of amide activation as a trigger for nucleophilic addition/rearrangement sequences, studied the chemistry of hypervalent sulfur and explored the use of electrocyclic ring opening reactions in tandem with asymmetric catalysis.
In this lecture, we will recount the story of those discoveries as well as present recent applications in total synthesis that address current problems in state-of-the-art methodology.