People - Faculty - Professor: Armen Zakarian

Field(s): Organic Chemistry
Email: zakarian@chem.ucsb.edu
Phone: (805) 893-3717 Fax: (805) 893-4120
Office: 2217 Chem 
Selected Publications
Go to Research Group website
Bio: Armen Zakarian joined the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at UC Santa Barbara in 2008. After obtaining a doctorate degree working with Professor Robert A. Holton, he moved to the University of California, Irvine, for a two-year postdoctoral research collaboration in the Overman group. He received his undergraduate training at Moscow State University, and carried out his diploma work at the N. D. Zelinsky Institute of Organic Chemistry with Vladimir Borodkin.


Research Objective

Our group is exploring natural products as a platform for the development of new chemistry that may ultimately enable more efficient preparation of useful organic materials for a variety of applications, such as pharmaceuticals, new therapies, or in materials chemistry. Biologically active compounds displaying promising anticancer, antibacterial, neurotoxic or other interesting activities are our typical targets. Natural products derived from marine environment are among favorite targets for our synthetic efforts due to their scarcity and structural novelty. Structural novelty inspires the development of new strategies and methods for organic synthesis, and scarcity makes totals synthesis an ideal venture to provide sufficient amount of material for further biological studies, fundamental or clinical.

At the initial stages of our projects, our main focus is development of new methodology, fundamental understanding of chemical reactivity, and mechanistic studies of organic transformations.

Selected Research Publications
Ilardi, E. A.; Stivala, C. E.; Zakarian, A. "Hexafluoroisopropanol as a Unique Solvent for Stereoselective Iododesilylation" Org. Lett. 2008, 10, 1727-1730.
Stivala, C.; Zakarian, A. "Total Synthesis of (+)-Pinnatoxin A" J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2008, 130, 3774-3776.
Qin, Y.; Stivala, C. E., Zakarian, A. "Acyclic Stereocontrol in the Ireland-Claisen Rearrangement of alpha-Branched Esters" Angewandte Chemie, Int. Ed. 2007, 46, 7466-7469.
Zakarian, A.; Lu, C.-D. "Development of the 1,2-Oxaza-Cope Rearrangement" J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2006, 128, 5356-5357.


Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry 9510
University of California
Santa Barbara CA 93106 - 9510
Department Phone: 805-893-5675
Department Fax: 805-893-4120