Cluster Preface: Reinventing Radical Reactions

Ryan Shenvi is an associate professor with tenure in the Department of Chemistry at The Scripps Research Institute. He earned his B.S. degree with honors and distinction in chemistry from Penn State University, where he was a research student in the laboratories of John Desjarlais and Ray Funk. He obtained his Ph.D. in 2008 as an NDSEG predoctoral fellow with Phil Baran at The Scripps Research Institute, and then joined the laboratory of E. J. Corey at Harvard University as an NIH-funded postdoctoral fellow. In 2010, Ryan returned to Scripps to start his own lab, which explores the chemical synthesis of secondary metabolites that are relevant to human health. These efforts frequently require the invention of new chemical reactions and also lead to discoveries in biology.