Distinguished Professor of Chemistry

Organic and Medicinal chemistry

Overman Group Website

National Academy of Sciences, 1996; American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1996; Ryoji Noyori Prize, Society of Synthetic Organic Chemistry, Japan, 2015; Roger Adams Award in Organic Chemistry, American Chemical Society, 2015; UCI Medal, University of California, Irvine, 2011; American Chemical Society, Herbert C. Brown Award for Creative Research in Synthetic Methods, 2010; Tetrahedron Prize for Creativity in Organic Chemistry, 2008; The Nagoya Medal of Organic Chemistry, 2007; International Society of Heterocyclic Chemistry Senior Award, 2005; American Chemical Society Arthur C. Cope Award, 2003; UC Irvine Distinguished Faculty Lectureship Award for Research, 2002–2003; Yamada Prize, 2002; Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Fellowship, 2000; S. T. Li Prize for Achievements in Science and Technology, 1999; Centenary Medal, Chemical Society, U.K., 1997; American Chemical Society Award for Creative Work in Synthetic Organic Chemistry, 1995; Guggenheim Fellowship, 1993–1994; Javits Neuroscience Investigator Award, 1985–1992; 1992–1999, American Chemical Society Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award, 1989; Visiting Miller Research Fellow, U.C. Berkeley, 1989; Alexander von Humboldt U.S. Senior Scientist Award, 1985–1987; Camille and Henry Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, 1976–1981; U.C. Irvine School of Physical Sciences Distinguished Teaching Award, 1981; U.C. Irvine Alumni Association Distinguished Research Award, 1979; Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellow, 1975–1977

NIH Postdoctoral Fellow, Columbia University, 1969–1971
Joined UCI Faculty in 1971

Professor Overman's research interests center on the invention of new reactions and strategies in organic synthesis and the total synthesis of natural products and their congeners. Total synthesis targets of our laboratory include agents displaying a variety of pharmacological activities. We are involved also in collaborative programs in the areas of cancer biology, learning and memory, and tropical parasitic diseases.

Larry Overman was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1943 and raised in Hammond, an industrial town in northern Indiana. In his late teens, he worked in the local steel mills to help pay for his education at Earlham College, a small liberal arts college in Richmond Indiana. After receiving his B.A. in 1965, he moved to the University of Wisconsin where he worked with Professor Howard W. Whitlock, Jr. For his dissertation, he studied in model systems the mechanism of the backbone rearrangement stage of steroid biosynthesis. In 1969 he moved to Columbia University as an NIH Postdoctoral fellow to study with Professor Ronald Breslow. He published in 1970 with Breslow a paper entitled "An Artificial Enzyme" that reported a hydrolytic catalyst that incorporated both a hydrophobic binding site and a metal-catalytic group. In 1971, he moved to join the six-year-old University of California campus at Irvine. He remained at UC Irvine for 50 years, closing his research laboratory in 2021. He is currently Distinguished Professor of Chemistry, emeritus at UC Irvine. Professor Overman was Chair of the UC Irvine Department of Chemistry from 1990–1993.

Professor Overman's research interests center on the invention of new transformations and strategies in organic synthesis and the total synthesis of natural products and their congeners. Early in his career, Professor Overman invented a broadly useful method for preparing allylic nitrogen compounds from readily available allylic alcohols, now often referred to as the Overman rearrangement. Professor Overman and his co-workers developed a suite of cyclization reactions that create new heterocyclic and carbocyclic rings while controlling stereochemistry to an exceptional degree. One of these, the aza-Cope/Mannich rearrangement, has served as the cornerstone of total syntheses of more than a dozen alkaloids, highlighted by the first enantioselective total synthesis of strychnine in 1993. Professor Overman pioneered in the use of intramolecular insertion reactions of organopalladium intermediates for assembling complex polycyclic molecules, particularly those containing congested quaternary carbon centers. He reported together with Shibasaki the first catalytic enantioselective Heck reactions in xxxx, among the earliest catalytic enantioselective C–C bond coupling reactions. A highlight of his late research was the demonstration that complex fragments could be united by bimolecular coupling reactions of carbon-centered radicals using equimolar equivalents of the addends. Using synthesis strategies developed largely in his laboratory, Professor Overman and his coworkers completed total syntheses of more than 100 structurally complex natural products. Ninety Ph.D. students and more than 200 postdoctoral fellows trained in Professor Overman's research laboratory.

"Constructing Saturated Guanidinum Heterocycles by Cycloaddition of N-Amidinyliminium Ions with Indoles"
T. K. Allred, M. B. Shaghafi, P.-P. Chen, Q. Tran, K. N. Houk, L. E. Overman
Organic Letters 2021, 23, 7618–7623.

"Lewis Acid Activation of Fragment-Coupling Reactions of Tertiary Carbon Radicals Promoted by Visible Light Irradiation of EDA Complexes"
S. P. Pitre, T. K. Allred, L. E. Overman
Organic Letters 2021, 23, 1103–1106

"Strategic Use of Visible-Light Photoredox Catalysis in Natural Product Synthesis"
S. P. Pitre, L. E. Overman
Chem. Rev. 2021, 121, https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.chemrev.1c00247

"Potent Anticancer Effects of Epidithiodiketopiperazine NT1721 in Cutaneous T Cell Lymphoma"
M. Lin, C. M. Kowolik, J. Xie, S. Yadav, L. E. Overman, D. A. Horne
Cancers, 2021, 13, 3367

"Constructing Saturated Guanidinum Heterocycles by Cycloaddition of N-Amidinyliminium Ions with Indoles"
T. K. Allred, M. B. Shaghafi, P.-P. Chen, Q. Tran, K. N. Houk, L. E. Overman
Organic Letters 2021, 23, 7618–7623

"Enantioselective Total Synthesis of Macfarlandin C, a Spongian Diterpenoid Harboring a Concave-Substituted cis-Dioxabicyclo[3.3.0]octanone Fragment"
T. K. Allred, A. P. Dieskau, P. Zhao, G. L. Lackner, L. E. Overman
Angewandte Chemie International Edition 2020, 59, 6268–6272

"General Access to Concave-Substituted cis-Dioxabicyclo[3.3.0]octanones: Enantioselective Total Syntheses of Macfarlandin C and Dendrillolide A"
T. K. Allred, A. P. Dieskau, P. Zhao, G. L. Lackner, L. E. Overman
Journal of Organic Chemistry 2020, 85, 15532–15551

"Forging C(sp3)–C(sp3) Bonds with Carbon-Centered Radicals in the Synthesis of Complex Molecules"
S. P. Pitre, N. A. Weires, L. E. Overman
Journal of the American Chemical Society 2019, 141,

"Fragment Coupling With Tertiary Radicals Generated By Visible-Light Photocatalysis"
C. R. Jamison and L. E. Overman
Accounts of Chemical Research 2016, 49, 1578–1586

National Academy of Sciences

American Academy of Arts & Sciences

AAAS

American Chemical Society

Link to this profile
https://faculty.uci.edu/profile/?facultyId=2042

Last updated
02/12/2022