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Joe Azzarelli is a Goldwater Scholar
Joe Azzarelli has received one of two 2009 Goldwater Scholarships awarded to MSU students. The award gives each recipient up to $7,500 a year for tuition, fees, books, plus room and board.
Joe joined the research group of Prof. Hien Nguyen after taking organic chemistry in his sophomore year. He worked with Prof. Nguyen for part of the summer of 2008, then spent time at MIT as an Amgen Scholar, and now continues his work in Prof. Nguyen’s laboratory. He is currently working on developing a palladium-catalyzed intramolecular rearrangement reaction on a glucal substrate that would allow for direct, single step access to sialic acid analogs. Sialic acid is a very important biological compound that plays a significant role in cell-cell recognition during tumor growth, as well as assisting the Influenza virus with cell-cell recognition. To date, no economically feasible syntheses of sialic acid analogs exist, and thus there have been very few studies that investigate the use of sialic acid derivatives to selectively interrupt tumor growth. Developing an economical synthesis of sialic acid could potentially play a large role in further exploring the therapeutic potential of this compound and its derivatives.
Joe will carry his research this summer at Stanford University with Barry Trost. to work on developing the methodology for palladium-catalyzed alkyne-alkyne cross-coupling reactions. He is going there on an American Chemical Society Division of Organic Chemistry Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship
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