Francisco Dean Toste (born 1971) is the Gerald E. K. Branch Distinguished Professor of Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley and faculty scientist at the chemical sciences division of Lawrence Berkeley National Lab.

[6] With Still, Toste developed several novel reactions of thiocyanates[7][8][9][10] that were then applied towards the synthesis of the natural product Varacin.

Toste attended graduate school at Stanford University, earning his PhD under the supervision of Barry Trost in 2000[12] While at Stanford, Toste published twenty-four publications on a range of topics, including phenols in palladium-catalyzed reactions,[13][14][15] and ruthenium-catalyzed carbon-carbon bond forming reactions.

[21] From 2001 to 2002, Toste conducted postdoctoral studies at the California Institute of Technology with Robert H. Grubbs, where he worked on ruthenium-catalyzed cross-metathesis variants of the olefin metathesis reaction.

He has served as a faculty scientist at the chemical sciences division of Lawrence Berkeley National Lab since 2007.