Donald Craig was born in Richmond, Yorkshire in 1961, and was brought up on the other side of the Pennines in Lancaster, Lancashire. After school in Morecambe, he worked for a year as a pre-university student at ICI's Corporate Laboratory at Runcorn. He obtained his chemistry degree at Imperial College (1983), and his Ph.D. (1986) also at Imperial, working for his doctorate on insect antifeedant synthesis under the supervision of Professor Steve Ley FRS. In 1986/87 he spent 11 months as an SERC (now EPSRC)/NATO postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Professor Clark Still at Columbia University, where he worked on semi-synthetic derivatives of the ionophore monensin A in order to probe the effects of macrocyclic conformation on epoxidation stereoselectivity. He was appointed to the academic staff at Imperial College in 1987 as a lecturer in the Department of Chemistry, and in 1997 was promoted to Reader. In 2000 he was promoted to a personal Chair in the Department. In 1994 he received the ZENECA Award for Research in Organic Chemistry, and the Pfizer Academic Award. In 1996 he received one of the Glaxo Wellcome Awards for Innovative Organic Chemistry. In 1998 he was awarded a NOVARTIS Chemistry Lectureship, and received the Corday-Morgan Medal and Prize of the Royal Society of Chemistry the same year.

Synthesis

Recent work in the group has shown that exposure of allylic tosylacetates to sub-stoichiometric quantities of weak base (potassium acetate) and silylating agent (N,O-bis(trimethylsilyl-acetamide): BSA) causes in-situ silyl ketene acetal formation, [3,3]-sigmatropic rearrangement and decarboxylation; these transformations provide homoallylic sulfones in high yield in an overall decarboxylative Claisen rearrangement (dCr) reaction.

Craig D, Goldberg FW, Pett RW, et al., 2013, Aziridine-based concise synthesis of (+/-)-alstonerine, Chemical Communications, Vol:49, ISSN:1359-7345, Pages:9275-9277 Craig D, 2013, Creating Complexity, Beilstein Journal of Organic Chemistry, Vol:9, ISSN:1860-5397, Pages:1881-1882 Camp JE, Craig D, Funai K, et al., 2011, Decarboxylative Claisen rearrangement reactions: synthesis and reactivity of alkylidene-substituted indolines, Organic & Biomolecular Chemistry, Vol:9, ISSN:1477-0520, Pages:7904-7912 Craig D, Harvey JW, O'Brien AG, et al., 2011, Claisen rearrangements of equilibrating allylic azides, Organic & Biomolecular Chemistry, Vol:9, ISSN:1477-0520, Pages:7057-7061

Craig D, Funai K, Gore SJ, et al., 2011, Transannular Claisen rearrangement reactions for the synthesis of vinylcyclobutanes: formal synthesis of (+/-)-grandisol, Organic & Biomolecular Chemistry, Vol:9, ISSN:1477-0520, Pages:8000-8002