Professor Oleg M Nefedov obituary
25 November 1931 – 28 July 2023
Oleg M. Nefedov was born on November 25, 1931, in the town of Dmitrov, Moscow Region, in the family of a school teacher. In 1954, he graduated with honors from the D. I. Mendeleev Moscow Institute of Chemical Technology (now D.Mendeleev University of Chemical Technology).
In 1957, he defended his PhD Thesis entitled "Organometallic synthesis and properties of С17—С28 1-alkylnaphthalenes and 1´,1´-di(1-naphthyl)alkanes." In 1957, O. M. Nefedov moved to work at the N. D. Zelinsky Institute of Organic Chemistry of the USSR Academy of Sciences, where he worked all his life. From November 1959 to the end of March 1960 he worked as a post-doc at the University of Heidelberg, in the laboratory headed by Professor George Wittig (Nobel Prize winner in chemistry, 1979).
In 1967, he defended his Doctoral Thesis on "Research in the Chemistry of Carbenes and Some of Their Analogs." O. M. Nefedov founded the Department of Chemistry of Unstable Molecules and Small Rings at the Institute of Organic Chemistry; from 1968 to 2020, he headed the Laboratory of Chemistry of Carbenes and Small Rings.
In 1979, Professor Oleg was elected Corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences (Division of General and Technical Chemistry). In 1987, he was elected a Full Member of the USSR Academy of Sciences (since 1991, Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences).
He was the world-known scientist in organic and organoelement chemistry, one of the founders of the chemistry of carbenes and close analogs of carbenes, silylenes, germylenes and stannylenes, an important class of highly reactive intermediates in chemical reactions and processes.
The first detailed review on the chemistry of carbene analogs published by Nefedov in 1966 in Angewandte Chemie laid the foundations of the views on carbene analogs and is still relevant today.
Together with Russian and foreign colleagues, O. M. Nefedov further developed the known and proposed novel methods for generation of carbenes and carbene analogs, studied the spatial and electronic structures, reactivity, and reaction mechanisms for many intermediates of these classes, discovered a number of new reactions, synthesized the first representatives of previously unknown classes of compounds such as germacyclopropenes and digermacyclobutenes, and elaborated new approaches for studying the reactivity of carbene analogs in the excited electronic states and for generation and investigation of radical ion carbene analogs.
The pioneering works of O. M. Nefedov and his colleagues dealing with spectroscopic studies of carbenes, carbene analogs, free radicals, compounds with multiple bonds at silicon and germanium atoms, and other labile molecules in low-temperature inert matrices and in the gas phase gained wide recognition.
O. M. Nefedov and his colleagues made a great contribution to the chemistry of aliphatic diazo compounds, cyclopropanes, and cyclopropenes. They developed the fundamentals of the catalytic cyclopropanation of unsaturated compounds with diazomethane and other highly reactive diazoalkanes and established the regularities of regio- and stereoselective cyclopropanation of a wide range of unsaturated compounds in the presence of transition metal complexes.
The conceptually new approach to the introduction of fluorine into the aromatic ring proposed by O. M. Nefedov and his colleagues opened up large synthetic prospects, first of all, for the design of highly efficacious drugs.
The approach is based on the cycloaddition of fluorohalocarbenes and polyfluoroalkenes to unsaturated hydrocarbons followed by thermal isomerization of fluorinated cyclopropanes and cyclobutanes. This method provided a relatively easy access to a numerous class of chemical compounds: mono- and polyfluoroaromatic derivatives, which, in particular, are key compounds for the synthesis of some drugs, such as fluoroquinolone antibacterial agents and some other.
O. M. Nefedov was an active participant of the international scientific cooperation. From 1999 to 2007, he was a member of the Bureau and Executive Board of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC), one of the initiators and an active participant of the International Year of Chemistry in 2011.
In the period between 1989 to 2011, he was the President and one of the main organizers of the Mendeleev Congresses on Theoretical and Applied Chemistry, the largest scientific forum on chemistry in Russia. O. M. Nefedov was elected the Honorary Member of the Royal Society of Chemistry and the Chinese Chemical Society, the member of the Collegium Ramazzini (Italy), the Academy of Europe, the European Academy of Sciences and Arts, the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, and the Georgian Academy of Sciences. He was a Honorary Professor of a number of universities.
O.M. Nefedov´s merits were acknowledged with many awards.
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