Vadim A. Soloshonok

Vadim A. Soloshonok graduated from Kiev State University in 1983 and received his Ph.D. in 1987 from the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences (thesis director: Academician V.P. Kukhar). He continued his education in the area of asymmetric synthesis in collaboration with Professors Y. Belokon (Moscow, USSR, 1987-1990), P. Bravo (Milan, Italy, 1993), T.Hayashi (Sapporo, Japan 1994-1995) and V. Hruby (Tucson, USA, 1998-2000). In 1987 he joined the Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry, Kiev, Ukraine, where he has been working until 1995. From 1995 through 1999 he was Senior Researcher at the National Industrial Research Institute, Nagoya, Japan and from 2001 to 2010 Professor of Chemistry at the University of Oklahoma, USA. Currently he is the Ikerbasque Research Professor at the University of Basque Country, Sun Sebastian, Spain, EU and the Visiting Professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, NY, USA. He is currently serving as a member of the international advisory editorial board of the Journal of Fluorine Chemistry (2003- present), Synthesis Field Editor of Amino Acids (2009- present), Past-Chair of the ACS Fluorine Division, (2010); author of over 280 research papers, 11 book chapters, and 10 patents, and editor of 13 books/Special Issues of many International Journals. His publications have generated over 11,000 citations with a h-index of 64. Since 2005 has been invited to give more than 180 Keynote Lectures and Invited Talks at international meetings, universities and industry. His major current research interests are: fluorine chemistry, asymmetric synthesis of alpha- and beta-amino acids and Self-Disproportionation of Enantiomers.

Aaron Aponick

Aaron Aponick was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey in 1976 and grew up in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. He became interested in organic chemistry at Lebanon Valley College where he studied reactions of quinones with organometallics under the guidance of the late Carl Wigal. After obtaining a B.S. in 1998 he moved to the University of Michigan and joined the research group of Will Pearson. At UM, where he was an Eastman Kodak Fellow and an American Chemical Society, Division of Organic Chemistry Fellow (sponsored by the Schering-Plough Research Institute), his interests in the chemistry of imines, the synthesis of alkaloids, and catalytic enantioselective reactions developed. In 2003, he was awarded a Ph.D. and moved to Stanford University where he worked with Barry Trost as a National Institutes of Health Postdoctoral Fellow. In July 2006, he became an Assistant Professor of Chemistry at the University of Florida and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2013. He is also currently the Director of Graduate Studies and the Director of the Florida Center for Heterocyclic compounds. His work focuses on the development of new reactions, specifically in the area of catalysis with a focus on preparing heterocyclic and using heterocyclic chiral ligands in catalytic enantioselective reactions.