Rate My Professor Bruce H. Lipshutz

Bruce H. Lipshutz is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he joined the faculty as an Assistant Professor in 1979 following his Ph.D. from Yale University and a two-year American Cancer Society postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University. His career has centered on developing reagents and technologies that have gained broad adoption in synthetic organic chemistry, such as SEM-Cl for hydroxyl group protection, higher order cuprates, copper hydride-in-a-bottle, PTS, and the designer surfactant TPGS-750-M. Lipshutz's research group emphasizes green chemistry, pioneering micellar catalysis in recyclable water to replace organic solvents, enabling transition metal-catalyzed processes under mild room temperature conditions with minimal byproducts and ppm levels of precious metals.

The group's innovations include Pd-catalyzed Suzuki-Miyaura, Sonogashira, and amination reactions, Ni-catalyzed reductions of dihalocyclopropanes, Tsuji-Trost allylations, and biocatalysis in aqueous nanoreactors, alongside flow chemistry applications and total syntheses of pharmaceuticals. Highly cited publications feature reviews like "CuH-catalyzed reactions" (Chemical Reviews, 2008), "Organocopper reagents: substitution, conjugate addition, carbo/metallocupration, and other reactions" (Organic Reactions, 2004), and "Five-membered heteroaromatic rings as intermediates in organic synthesis" (Chemical Reviews, 1986), as well as "TPGS-750-M: a second-generation amphiphile for metal-catalyzed cross-couplings in water at room temperature" (Journal of Organic Chemistry, 2011). His transformative work on sustainable synthesis has earned major honors including the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship (1984-1988), ACS Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award (1997), U.S. EPA Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Award (2011), EROS Best Reagent of the Year Award (2012), ACS H. C. Brown Award for Creative Research in Synthetic Methods (2017), and ACS Green Chemistry Institute Peter J. Dunn Award (2017).