Gautam Radhakrishna Desiraju

About Gautam Radhakrishna Desiraju

Gautam Radhakrishna Desiraju (born August 21, 1952) is an Indian chemist who works in the Solid State and Structural Chemistry Unit of the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. He works in the area of structural chemistry and crystal engineering. Desiraju has played a major role in the development of crystal engineering for nearly three decades. He, among others, has been responsible in recent times for the acceptance of the theme of weak hydrogen bonding in structural and supramolecular chemistry. His books on crystal engineering (1989) and on the weak hydrogen bond in structural chemistry and biology (1999) are especially notable. He has co-authored a textbook in crystal engineering (2011). He is one of the most highly cited Indian chemists and has been recognised by a number of awards such as the Alexander von Humboldt Forschungspreis and the TWAS award in Chemistry. He was elected President of the International Union of Crystallography for the triennium 2011-2014.

Biography

Gautam Desiraju was born 21 August 1952 in Chennai, India, formerly Madras. Desiraju obtained his B.Sc. (1972) from St. Xavier's College, Bombay and Ph.D. (1976) from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he worked under the supervision of David Y. Curtin and Iain C. Paul. He worked between 1976 and 1978 in the Research Laboratories of Eastman Kodak Company in Rochester, NY. From 1978 to 1979 he was a research fellow in the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. He joined the University of Hyderabad in 1979 as a lecturer and was promoted as reader in 1984 and professor in 1990. He spent a year (1988–1989) in the CR&D department of DuPont in Wilmington as a visiting scientist. After 30 years in the University of Hyderabad, he joined the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore. He is a member of the editorial advisory boards of Angewandte Chemie, Journal of the American Chemical Society, Chemical Communications and Chemical Science. He is the president of the International Union of Crystallography. He was the chair of the first Gordon Research Conference in Crystal Engineering, which was held in 2010. He is a recipient of an honorary doctorate degree of the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Argentina.

Major research contributions

Desiraju's major contribution to the subject of crystal engineering has been the development of the concept of the supramolecular synthon, which is a small sub-structural unit that is an adequate enough representation of the entire crystal structure of a molecular solid. The major problem in crystal engineering is that the prediction of a crystal structure from a molecular structure is very difficult, and not easily derivable from functional groups. Identification of supramolecular synthons simplifies this otherwise intractable problem so that some progress may be made in the design of a particular crystal structure. His review on this subject in Angewandte Chemie in 1995 now has more than 2500 citations and is a major landmark in the area. The supramolecular synthon concept is now widely used by crystal engineers notably in the design of pharmaceutical co-crystals, which are important from scientific and commercial viewpoints. Crystal engineering is effectively like supramolecular synthesis in the solid state, and there is a direct analogy between the supramolecular synthon of Desiraju and the molecular synthon that was proposed for organic synthesis by E. J. Corey.

Desiraju's second major contribution has been to recognise that weakly activated groups like the C-H group can act as donors of hydrogen bonds in molecular and biomolecular systems. These weak hydrogen bonds had been discussed sporadically since the 1930s, but it was only after the 1980s that the idea of a weakly activated group forming hydrogen bonds gained acceptance in the chemical community. Desiraju was among the few structural chemists who argued in those early days that the C-H...O and other weak interactions have a hydrogen bond character.

Desiraju has authored around 375 publications, and in addition to the three books on crystal engineering and hydrogen bonding mentioned above, he has edited three multi-author books on these topics in structural chemistry. He has guided the Ph. D work of more than 30 students over the past 30 years.