Special Topics in Organic Chemistry I

A graduate seminar that uses pharmaceutical chemistry — specifically photodynamic therapy and singlet-oxygen chemistry — as a lens for reading the current organic chemistry literature critically. You'll spend most of the term digging into recent papers on photosensitizers, molecular logic gates, and activatable therapeutic agents, then presenting and defending your analysis in front of the class rather than grinding through problem sets. It assumes you already have solid synthetic organic foundations and pushes you toward the kind of literature fluency and retrosynthetic thinking you'll need for thesis research at the interface of organic, photophysical, and medicinal chemistry.