Richmond Sarpong (born April 23, 1974, in Bechem, Ghana)[1] is a Ghanaian-American chemist who is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
[11] Sarpong got his hands on his father's copy of the Merck Index, an encyclopedia of chemicals, and spent his free time imagining how chemistry could change people's lives.
[1][14] Having this additional mentor encouraged Sarpong to pursue a career in chemistry, despite having an offer from a premedical program at a British university.
At Macalester, he conducted undergraduate research with Prof. Rebecca C. Hoye on the determination of absolute stereochemistry of organic molecules using the Mosher method.
In Prof. Semmelhack's laboratory, he worked on organic compounds containing the enediyne functional group that model the activity of the calicheamicin class of antibiotics.
At Caltech, he worked alongside then-graduate student Neil Garg to complete the first total synthesis of the phosphate inhibitor dragmacidin D.[17] Sarpong also developed a novel tandem Wolff/Cope rearrangement to synthesize fused ring molecules.