Alexander Dilman

Alexander Dilman
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Alma mater	Higher Chemical College of the Russian Academy of Sciences
Scientific career
Fields	Organic chemistry, Organofluorine chemistry
Institutions	N. D. Zelinsky Institute of Organic Chemistry
Doctoral advisors	Sema Leybovich Ioffe, Vladimir Alexandrovich Tartakovsky
Website	dilmanlab.ru

Alexander Davidovich Dilman (Russian: Алекса́ндр Дави́дович Ди́льман) is a Russian organic chemist and is a professor of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Dilman currently is a Head of the Laboratory of Functional Organic Compounds at N. D. Zelinsky Institute of Organic Chemistry of the Russian Academy of Sciences (ZIOC RAS). Since 2022 he is a Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Biography

Dilman was born in Moscow in 1976. At the age of 15 he attended the Moscow Chemical Lyceum in order to deep dive in chemistry. In 1993 Dilman attended the Higher Chemical College of the Russian Academy of Sciences. During his undergraduate research he studied the chemistry of nitro- and organosilicon compounds at the ZIOC RAS under Vladimir Tartakovsky supervision.

Dilman completed an internship in the group of Prof. Herbert Mayr at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in 2000. The results he obtained in Germany became a part of his dissertation. In 2001 he defended his Ph.D. thesis on the topic "Chemistry of N,N-bis(silyloxy)enamines" under Prof. Sema Ioffe supervision. During a post-doctoral internship in Prof. Henri Kagan`s laboratory Dilman studied the chemistry of rhodium and iridium carbene complexes in 2002.

Dilman began to work in the field of organofluorine chemistry at ZIOC RAS in 2003. In 2008, he defended his Dr. Sci. dissertation connected with the development of new methods for the synthesis of fluorinated amines. In 2011 Dilman became the head of the Laboratory of Functional Organic Compounds at ZIOC RAS.

Research

Dilman's early works are related to the chemistry of silanes containing a perfluorinated group. There are studies on reactivity to enamines, imines, iminium salts N-benzoyl hydrazones. Significant part of the research is devoted to the introduction of a trifluoromethyl group by means of Ruppert-Prakash reagent, a difluoromethyl moiety from difluorocarbene and transformations of α,α-difluorinated phosphonium salts. The development of methods for the introduction of CF₃– and CF₂H– groups is important for medicinal chemistry.

Recently photoredox catalysis became the main research area of the Dilman group. Engaging visible light energy in chemical transformations allows many procedures to be more environmentally-friendly and widely available to organic chemists. Research of his group mainly connected with development of approaches for radical functionalization of alkenes, imines, hydrazones and radical C–H bonds activation. Other research directions are connected with the activation of carboxylic acids under acridine photocatalytic conditions as well as photochemical transformations of polyfluorinated aryl sulfides.

Teaching

Since 2003 Dilman, together with William Smith, taught the course "Organic Synthesis" at ZIOC RAS. In 2009 he continued to lecture on this discipline together with his student V. V. Levin. Based on mentioned course the book co-authored with W. A. Smith was published in 2008.

Awards

• Diploma of the 1st degree of the 6th Mendeleev Competition of scientific research works of chemistry students (1995)
• Medal of the Russian Academy of Sciences for Young Scientists (1999) (together with A. A. Tishkov).
• Laureate of grants from the President of the Russian Federation to support young scientists
• Laureate of the Foundation for the Promotion of National Science (2008)
• Liebig Lecturer Award of the German Chemical Society (2019)