CV

Christian Stanetty received his basic chemistry education at the TU-Wien (Austria) graduating in 2005 (master level) with a specialisation in organic chemistry. During his diploma thesis conducted at the University of Vienna (Prof. Noe), he developed new methodology for the alcoholic cleavage of aziridines and contributed to the synthesis of a novel [¹⁸F]-PET tracer intended for Alzheimer disease. He then joined Prof. Kosma’s group (University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna) for his doctoral studies exploring the bioactive potential (e.g. antiviral activities) of glycyrrhizin (a triterpene saponine) derived compounds. For the performance throughout his studies he was awarded to receive his doctorate under the auspices of the Austrian Federal President. Christian stayed on in the group to strengthen his expertise in carbohydrate chemistry preparing phosphorylated oligosaccharides based on L-glycero-D-manno-heptose for immunological studies. In 2013, he was awarded an ‘Erwin Schrödinger Fellowship’ (Austrian Science Fund) allowing him to join the group of Prof. Ian Baxendale at Durham University, UK, to get trained in Flow Chemistry by one of the pioneers in this field. In 2015, he returned to TU Wien and joined the research group of Prof. Marko D. Mihovilovic.

Full CV including publications

Research

Christian’s main research interest is focused on transferring modern organic synthesis (preferably organocatalytic methodology), and up-to-date instrumentation (Flow Chemistry) into the challenging setting of carbohydrate chemistry. In his current projects, the interconversion of monosaccharides is in the centre of attention, addressing the natural reactivity of sugars carbonyl moiety (in the open chain form). All activities are aiming at the development of general solutions and possibly scalable methodology. Ideally these approaches open more efficient avenues to currently rare or exotic sugars in order to expand the base of compounds which can serve as valuable chiral starting materials.

A second class of compounds, Christian has been engaged with are phytosiderophores from the mugineic acid family, a class of compounds that are segregated by the root system of certain plants to harvest iron and other micronutrients from the rhizosphere (collaboration with BOKU/University of Vienna). Although being chemically unrelated (oligoaminoacids), these structures in fact share several features with carbohydrates: high polarity and hydrophilicity, multiple chiral centres that need to be controlled and multiple copies of very similar functional groups that need to be distinguished.