Professor Sir David MacMillan

We are delighted to confirm our Keynote Speaker is, 2021 Nobel Prize winner, Professor Sir David (Dave) MacMillan. He is a world renowned chemist and the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Chemistry at Princeton University, USA.

He shared the 2021 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Benjamin List “for the development of asymmetric organocatalysis”. He used his share of the $1.14 million prize to establish the May and Billy MacMillan Foundation.

Dave MacMillan was born in Bellshill, Scotland and received his undergraduate degree in chemistry from the University of Glasgow, where he worked with Dr. Ernie Colvin. In 1990, he began his doctoral studies with Professor Larry Overman at the University of California, Irvine, before undertaking a postdoctoral position with Professor Dave Evans at Harvard University in 1996. He began his independent career at the University of California, Berkeley in 1998 before moving to Caltech in 2000 as the Earle C. Anthony Chair of Organic Chemistry. In 2006, Dave moved to Princeton University as the A. Barton Hepburn Professor of Chemistry. He served as Department Chair from 2010–15.

MacMillan was the founder of the Princeton Catalysis Initiative, in which companies invest and can develop projects in conjunction with researchers from a wide range of areas, harvesting innovation and new knowledge. It currently involves 15 departments, 95 teaching staff, and six industrial partners. He hopes to see this type of partnership between academia and business gain space in Brazil, which would give a greater dimension to the excellence of the country’s scientists and would contribute towards strengthening the pharmaceutical sector. His laboratory has played a part in the development of photoredox catalysis over the last 17 years, with more than 100 published works, of which more than 20 have been featured in Science or Nature. They aspire to continue to grow the chemist’s synthetic toolbox of transformations that are novel yet highly adaptable across the many fields of science that rely upon molecule construction.