Robert Britton

Professor at Simon Fraser University

Speaker

Britton obtained his B. Sc. from the University of Waterloo in 1996 working with Professor Victor Snieckus, and his Ph. D. in natural product isolation, structural elucidation, and total synthesis from the University of British Columbia in 2002 with Professors Edward Piers and Raymond Anderson. He spent two years at the University of Cambridge with Professor Ian Paterson as an NSERC PDF then joined the Process Research Group at Merck as a Senior Scientist. In 2005, he started an independent academic career at Simon Fraser University and was promoted to Professor in 2015. He is a Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research Career Scholar and holds the inaugural SFU Innovation Fellow Award. Britton has broad research interests that include natural product synthesis, nucleic acid chemistry, medicinal chemistry, radiotracer development and insect communication. Research in these areas have led to commercial traps for bed bugs and other crop pests, 18F-labelled amino acids and peptides for PET imaging in oncology, new platform technologies for nucleoside synthesis and the late-stage modification of drug leads, and new strategies for synthesizing structurally complex natural products. These efforts have also resulted in the creation of two spin off companies - Cloudburst Biotech and Carbaform Biosciences.