John A. Porco Jr PhD

John A. Porco Jr received his B.A. in chemistry in 1985 from the College of the Holy Cross and a Ph.D. in organic chemistry from Harvard University with Professor Stuart Schreiber in 1992. From 1992-to 1993, he was an NSF postdoctoral fellow with Professor Chi Huey Wong at the Scripps Research Institute. John then spent six years in the industry, first working in venture capital at Avalon Ventures, and then at Argonaut Technologies where he became Director of Parallel Medicinal Chemistry. He joined the Department of Chemistry at Boston University in 1999 as Assistant Professor and was promoted to Professor in September 2004. In 2002, he successfully led an effort to establish the Center for Chemical Methodology and Library Development at Boston University (CMLD-BU). Funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) as a Center of Excellence, the focus of the CMLD-BU was the discovery of new methodologies to produce novel chemical libraries of unprecedented complexity for biological screening. In 2014, the CMLD-BU was transitioned to the Center for Molecular Discovery (BU-CMD), an integrated infrastructure for the discovery of small-molecule chemical probes. ​

Professor Porco’s research is focused on two major areas of the development of new synthetic methodologies for the chemical synthesis of complex molecules and the synthesis of complex chemical libraries. Synthetic methodologies developed by the Porco laboratory include copper (I)-mediated formation of enamides, oxa-electrocyclization/dimerization of denials en route to complex epoxyquinoid frameworks; enantioselective oxidative dearomatization using chiral copper complexes, and molecular oxygen; photocycloaddition using oxidopyryliums en route to the rocaglamides and related natural products, and catalytic ester-amide exchange using group (IV) metal alkoxide-activator complexes. In the past eighteen years, his research group has synthesized numerous complex natural products including torreyanic acid, the salicylate enamide macrolides loperamide C and oxidizes, the rocaglamides, Silvestro L, monensin, cyclonic acids A and D, griffipavixanthone, and kinamycin C.