Draft:John Michael Brown

John Michael Brown (born 1939) is a British organic chemist.

Brown studied at the University of Manchester, where he received his doctorate under Arthur John Birch, and was a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University under Ronald Breslow. He taught at the University of Warwick from 1966 to 1974 and was a lecturer in organic chemistry at Oxford from 1974 to 2008, where he is a Fellow of Wadham College and is now retired. He introduced modern organometallic catalysis at Oxford in the 1970s

He deals with enantioselective synthesis in organic chemistry and was involved in the development of transfer hydrogenation with rhodium and the clarification of its mechanisms (reactive intermediates, Halpern-Brown mechanism). He worked on stereocontrol in targeted hydrogenation and asymmetric hydroboration, where he and his research group introduced the ligand quinap. He studied palladium-catalyzed reactions (Heck reaction) of alkenes as well as palladium-catalyzed methylation with an internally activated TMS group, the Soai reaction and reactions with ruthenium catalyst.

In 2013 he received the Robert Robinson Award. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society.

Publications

 * with D. Gridnev, J. Klankermayer: "Asymmetric Autocatalysis with Organozinc Complexes; Elucidation of the Reaction Pathway, I"., in: Kensō Soai (ed.): Amplification of chirality, Topics in current chemistry 284, Springer 2008, pp. 35–65
 * with Roger W. Alder, Ray Baker: Mechanism in organic chemistry, Wiley 1971