Phil S. Baran

Phil S. Baran was born in Denville, New Jersey, on August 10, 1977, and grew up in Coral Springs, Florida. He remembers being a poor student at high school, preferring to play role-playing games, write computer programs and build with Lego.^[6]

Encouraged by his chemistry teacher to experiment after school, Baran quickly channeled his creativity into crafting molecules. In 1995 he began a chemistry degree at New York University, and enthusiastically accepted [David] Schuster's offer to work in his lab, synthesizing compounds that linked C60 with porphyrins to make artificial photosynthetic systems.^[6] He received his BS in chemistry from New York University in 1997.

He went on to earn his PhD from The Scripps Research Institute in 2001, under the supervision of K. C. Nicolaou, an experience he recalls was 'like hardcore Navy Seal training'^[6] and where he co-authored 30 papers in less than four years.

He then pursued a postdoctoral fellowship in the laboratory of Nobel Laureate Elias James Corey at Harvard University who reflected on Baran's time in his lab, saying, "He had a phenomenal grasp of synthetic chemistry," and "felt that he could be a leader in his generation."^[6]

Phil Baran began his independent career at the Scripps Research Institute in the summer of 2003, at only 26 years old, and received tenure just three years later. In the 20 years since then, he has supervised over 300 graduate students, post-doctoral scholars, visiting scholars and interns.^[7] He is currently the Dr. Richard A. Lerner Endowed Chair at Scripps Research^[8]

His work is focused on practicality and simplicity in the total synthesis of organic molecules, eschewing protecting groups, functional group manipulations, and non-essential redox manipulations. Several of his total syntheses are now being adopted for commercial production. His contributions in methodology center around practical C-H functionalization reactions and have had a remarkable impact based on actual drug candidates brought into the clinic using these methods and the sales of numerous reagents he has commercialized for use in the pharmaceutical industry.^[9] Additionally, since the mid 2010's, Baran's lab has focused on developing electrochemical methodologies for use in total synthesis and medicinal chemistry as it allows for more atom economical and environmentally-conscious protocols.

Phil Baran has given hundreds of talks all over the world and is the recipient of dozens of distinguished awards. Among many honors, he has notably earned the Amgen Young Investigator Award (2005), ACS Award in Pure Chemistry (2010), the MacArthur Fellowship (2013), the Mukaiyama Award (2014), the ACS Elias J. Corey Award (2016), the Danisco Science Excellence Medal Award (2022), and the Edison Patent Award (2023).^[10]

In addition to his numerous achievements in academia, Baran also holds many accolades in industry as a scientific entrepreneur, company co-founder, consultant and scientific advisor. He co-founded his first company Sirenas Marine Discovery in 2012 alongside Eduardo Esquenazi and Jake Beverage —a company that is dedicated to marine-inspired molecular discoveries and pre-clinical leads for cancer, HIV, and infectious diseases.^[11] In 2016, he joined forces with fellow Scripps colleagues, Benjamin F. Cravatt and Jin-Quan Yu to co-found Vividion Therapeutics with the goal of identifying small molecules that bind currently undrugged targets via a covalent-first chemoproteomics approach.^[12] Vividion was sold to Bayer in 2021 for $2 billion ($1.5 billion with an additional $500 million in milestone payments).^[13] In the same year, Baran founded Elsie Biotechnologies, an antisense oligonucleotide (ASO)-based company with the goal of discovering therapeutic agents that can achieve desirable medicinal effects not attainable with existing drugs by modulating gene expression of DNA or RNA.^[14] Elsie Biotechnologies was sold to GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) in 2024 for $50 million. Baran also co-founded and is on the scientific advisory team of Galileo Biosystems, a preclinical stage biopharmaceutical company focused on developing therapeutic agents for inflammatory and autoimmune diseases.^[15] He also serves on the scientific advisory board for seven additional companies (Eisai, Kemxtree, Quanta Therapeutics, Inc., Alkermes, Inc, Nutcracker Therapeutics, Inc., Hongene Biotech Corporation, Shouxin, and Sage Therapeutics) and has consulted for over twenty more, including presently at Bristol-Meyers-Squibb, Gilead, and BASF Corporation.^[3][10]

In 2014, Baran began a partnership with IKA, well-known laboratory equipment manufacturer, to bring to market a revolutionary piece of equipment that promised to standardize electrochemical protocols and make electrochemistry accessible to the average organic chemist.^[16] Three years after the partnership began, the ElectraSyn was debuted in a Steve Jobs-esque fashion at the American Chemical Society annual meeting, drawing a large crowd of eager chemists.^[17] In the seven years since, the ElectraSyn and subsequent ElectraSyn 2.0 have been widely adopted into the synthetic community and utilized towards hundreds of research articles and patents.^[18] The publicity surrounding Baran's (as well as Jin-Quan Yu's) partnership with IKA was highlighted with a memorable promotional video found here.

In 2025, the Baran laboratory reported a general platform for "redox-neutral radical cross-coupling"^[24] employing sulfonyl hydrazides as stable, crystalline radical precursors.

These reagents, which can be readily prepared from a variety of feedstocks (including alcohols, carbonyl compounds, amines, and hydrazines, or even transiently from hydrazones), serve a dual purpose: they generate alkyl radicals while donating electrons to activate the nickel catalyst. This eliminates the need for external redox additives, photoredox catalysts, electrochemical setups, or pyrophoric organometallic reagents. The reactions operate under exceptionally simple, Suzuki-like conditions—an inexpensive nickel catalyst, mild base, and gentle heating—releasing only benign nitrogen gas as a byproduct.^[24]

The platform has proven versatile across a wide range of contexts, enabling seven distinct C–C bond-forming transformations with partners including activated olefins (Giese-type additions), alkyl halides, redox-active esters, (hetero)aryl halides, alkenyl halides, alkynyl halides, and trifluoromethylating reagents. These couplings forge C(sp³)–C(sp³), C(sp³)–C(sp²), and C(sp³)–C(sp) bonds and have already been adopted in medicinal chemistry programs for the rapid assembly of complex, sp³-rich scaffolds and fragment libraries.^[24]

Later in 2025, the same sulfonyl hydrazide platform was extended to achieve the first stereospecific (stereoretentive) radical cross-couplings.^[25] Using readily accessible enantioenriched sulfonyl hydrazides and an achiral nickel catalyst (no chiral ligands or external redox agents required), the method delivers high levels of stereoretention through an inner-sphere mechanism involving a nickel-bound diazene intermediate. This advance overcomes the long-standing limitation of rapid racemization in free-radical intermediates (previously considered impossible on picosecond timescales) and enables the enantioselective construction of three-dimensional, sp³-rich molecules critical for drug discovery and total synthesis.

These innovations have been highlighted for their operational simplicity, scalability, and potential to streamline pharmaceutical development by reducing waste, cost, and reliance on specialized equipment. Sulfonyl hydrazides have already been commercialized by two vendors– Knight Chemicals, Inc. and Enamine.^[26]

• (+/-)-PI Reagent
• (+/-)-PSI Reagent
• CBMG or "Palau'chlor"
• CITU
• Zinc sulphinate salts
  • Zinc trifluoromethanesulphinate (TFMS), zinc difluoromethanesulphinate (DFMS), zinc trifluoroethanesulphinate (TFES), zinc monofluoromethanesulphinate (MFMS), zinc isopropylsulphinate (IPS), zinc triethyleneglycolsulphinate (TEGS)
• Among others, listed at Sigma Aldrich

Phil S. Baran has authored and co-authored nearly 300 research publications and has an h-index of 133 with over 60,000 citations across his group's publications.^[27] Articles authored by Baran and his group can be found in numerous prestigious journals including Science, Nature, Journal of American Chemical Society (JACS), Angewandte Chemie, Journal of Organic Chemistry (JOC), among several others.

Baran co-wrote the digital interactive reference text The Portable Chemist's Consultant: A Survival Guide for Discovery, Process, and Radiolabeling as well as several book chapters and forewords.^{[28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35]}

1. Skaggs Graduate School Commencement Ceremony (2024)
2. Reddit AMA (2016)
3. "What Makes a Good Chemist"