Profile of the supervisor
Prof. dr. ir. Adriaan J. Minnaard received his PhD in the group of Prof. De Groot at the Agricultural University Wageningen, The Netherlands. After two years as a scientist at DSM in Geleen, he became an assistant professor at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. He has been there ever since, with a break in the group of Prof. Waldmann at the Max Planck Institute in Dortmund. He is full professor and head of the department of Chemical Biology.
Expertise
Natural product synthesis, asymmetric catalysis, chemical biology.
Profile of the research group
The Chemical Biology group comprises four staff members, eleven PhD students, three postdocs, a technician and ten undergrads. Research topics in the group are natural product synthesis, including the development of novel synthesis and catalysis methodology, dynamic combinatorial chemistry, molecular modelling, computational chemistry, carbohydrate chemistry and activity-based probe development. A long-standing research line is the synthesis of complex glycolipids from Mycobacterium tuberculosis, an effort supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
