Larry E. Overman is Distinguished Professor of Chemistry at the University of California, Irvine.
degree from Earlham College in 1965, and he completed his Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1969, under Howard Whitlock Jr.
[4] Overman has performed many total syntheses of natural products, beginning with (±)-pumiliotoxin C (with Peter Jessup) in the late seventies.
[1] Overman has also worked extensively on the aza-Cope-Mannich reaction, originally designed[1] to solve a stereoelectronic problem in the total synthesis of gephyrotoxin.
[8] A related reaction, a Prins-Pinacol cascade which produces a tetrahydrofuran, has also been used extensively by the Overman group,[9] for example in the total synthesis of (–)-magellanine, a Lycopodium alkaloid.