After studying at the École nationale supérieure des industries chimiques de Nancy from 1958 to 1961, he obtained a doctorate under the supervision of Professor Serge David in 1966 and continued for two years at Harvard University in Massachusetts (United States) as a post-doctoral researcher with Professor Roger W.
[3] Pierre Sinaÿ's scientific work focuses on the chemistry of carbohydrates and the understanding of the role of oligosaccharides in the living world.
[4] This, by now allowing access to increasingly complex carbohydrate structures, is not unrelated to the development of glycobiology, the aim of which is to decode the meaning of this third alphabet of saccharides, which is in addition to that of proteins and nucleic acids.
First materialized by the use of nuclear magnetic resonance,[9] this concept was studied in detail using the chemical synthesis of constrained sugars adopting unconventional conformations.
Selective examples include the synthesis of spiroorthoesters by using selenium chemistry,[11] the development of organometallic chemistry of anomeric carbon,[12][13] the pioneering synthesis of C-disaccharides,[14] electrochemical glycosylation[15] and, more recently, a novel functionalization of cyclodextrins through a kind of molecular microsurgery in which aluminium derivatives are said to be the scalpel.