Punjabi Patrika
Friday, January 13th, 2012
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Chemistry grad student lands Marie Curie fellowship
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simple love of how basic building blocks can create complex molecular structures has landed Surreyraised Bal Kang, a Simon Fraser University chemistry graduate student, a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship, worth more than $270,000 (US). The highly prestigious research award, part of the Marie Curie Actions Program of the European Commission, allows postdoctoral fellows to carry out advanced research training at a world-leading research institution. Kang will spend the next two years at the University of Oxford further developing his methods to create pharmaceutically relevant compounds. “Organic chemistry is a challenging field; you are always in the search for the perfect reaction or route, trying to find the best strategy to solve each puzzle,” says Kang, a graduate of Queen Elizabeth Secondary school. “In the case of developing potential
mia drug, led to its commercialization.
drug molecules, the goal is to maximize the efficiency of the chemical processes.” The first graduate student to work in SFU professor Rob Britton’s research lab, Kang has already devised a new method to sythesize natural products – one aimed at protecting crops and fighting disease in humans. “In the Britton lab I developed a new method that allowed for the synthesis of a variety of insect sex pheromones, which have applications useful in crop protection,” he explains. “These methods also
allowed for the generation of many natural products that exhibit potent biological activities against many diseases, including breast, lung and colon cancers, leukemia and anti-parasitic and anti-fungal diseases.” Kang arrived in the Britton’s lab after completing his bachelor’s degree in science at UBC and working at a pair of local pharmaceutical companies, Cardiome and ActivePass Pharmaceuticals. While at Cardiome his work on the process development of Vernakalent, an anti-arrhyth-
The award brings Kang’s grant and award funds to nearly half a million dollars (just over $450,000) while at SFU. He was awarded the NSERC CGS-D Alexander Graham Bell Scholarship, the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research Senior Fellowship, an SFU Graduate Fellowship and an SFU President’s Research Stipend, allowing him to participate in numerous international conferences. At Oxford, he’ll be looking to discover new chemical transformations that allow complex molecular “scaffolds” to be constructed “in their most straightforward and economically viable manner.” “My long term goal is to come back to Canada to apply the new skills learned to transfer knowledge into a new generation of scientists,” he says. Kang is putting the final touches on his thesis and plans to graduate in June before heading for Oxford in July. ■
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