UmaShanker "Pop" Sampath, Class of 1991

I am a production and process development chemist.

As a graduate student I was focused on the research and development of synthetic methodology. I learned a variety of chemical transformations including reactions under high pressure, gaseous phases, low and high temperatures, etc. while preparing numerous intermediates and starting materials that I used in my research projects.

My doctoral advisor and mentor, Dr. Thomas A. Engler, was instrumental in my training as a synthetic organic chemist. The serendipitous existence of the Chemistry, Medicinal Chemistry and Pharmaceutical Chemistry departments under one roof in Malott Hall provided easy access to professors for guidance and discussion when needed. My earliest influences were from Professors Huyser, Burgstahler, Landgrebe, and B. Schowen during my role as a graduate teaching assistant, and later guided as a graduate researcher by Professors Givens, Carlson, Aubé, Georg, R. Schowen, and Vander Velde.

1. Organic Synthesis [textbooks: Advanced Organic Chemistry Parts A & B by Carey & Sundberg, Advanced Organic Chemistry by March] &
2. Spectroscopy [textbook: Spectroscopic Identification of Organic Compounds by Silverstein, Bassler & Morrill]

As a high school student in India, I had chosen to pursue a science curriculum in Standards XI and XII and performed well in the public examinations. I was offered a place in the chemistry program at the prestigious Vivekananda College [within University of Madras] in my hometown, Madras. The Chemistry Department was filled with professors who had trained with prominent chemists in major universities in the US and their passion for teaching chemistry and active research programs influenced my decision to pursue higher studies abroad in chemistry.

Students from India in the 1980s were able to apply only to a limited number of US universities, primarily due to the high graduate application fees. However, it was a great advantage to apply to US universities that had admitted students from one’s alma mater.  Dr. Sriram Naganathan, my undergraduate classmate at Vivekananda College was a KU graduate student at the time, and I believe his academic performance at KU and support for my application and my professors’ recommendations helped my prospects at KU and the eventual offer of admission and financial aid award.

After I arrived in Mallott Hall in the fall of 1985, I was delighted to experience the cordial, collaborative, cooperative and supportive nature of the professors of three chemistry related disciplines resident within its walls and benefitted immensely from those relationships with them and their graduate students and postdocs. In hindsight, I had fortuitously stumbled upon the most attractive reason to study chemistry at KU.

My career goals were simple – do chemistry that ultimately benefits society.  I have accomplished it by making products that are administered to patients for their return to good health for over 25 years.

I have worked in the industry for nearly three decades and at one, small family owned company, Reliable Biopharmaceutical [recently acquired by Avantor Inc].  I was part of a talented team of synthetic organic chemists that developed and patented processes for the production of active pharmaceutical ingredients [APIs] for generic versions of cancer [Cladribine, Fludarabine], cardiovascular [Phentolamine, Adenosine] and anesthetic drugs and manufactured advanced intermediates used in the production of synthetic oligonucleotide based therapeutics [antisense, ribozyme, RNAi, siRNA etc] and PCR.

I hope to train a group of chemists in my remaining years so they may continue the manufacture of high quality, life saving drugs for patients worldwide.

 I am a chemist by training but an artist by nature. While tackling chemistry challenges in the lab, I was expressing my creativity in the arts outside, and had won the KU School of Engineering seal design contest and a campus Amnesty International t-shirt design contest (with Dr. Romi Singh, my friend, KU classmate and alum - I still have the t-shirt 35 years later) and designed the cover for the abstracts of the MIKIW meetings organized by the KU Medicinal Chemistry department. Inspired by my success and the Jayhawk in the old KU School of Engineering seal, I thought it would be fun to transform our adorable Jayhawk into a chemist and thus the KU ChemHawk was born. I first created it by sketching it free hand and later updated it using Adobe Illustrator. I was delighted that it was used as the cover of the Abstracts of Midwest ACS meetings and the Chemistry Department newsletters and holiday card.

As a second year graduate student in 1986, I joined Dr. Thomas Engler’s group, located in what was formerly Dr. Huyser’s lab on the 5th floor in Mallott Hall.

As a creative individual, I appreciated the beauty and elegance in nature and organic synthesis. My memory centers around the excitement of one molecule, a Diels-Alder adduct I prepared and the beauty of the spectrum and techniques that revealed it.

I believe this product has the most beautiful proton NMR spectrum. Methylene [CH2] groups, ubiquitous in carbocylic compounds, are usually seen as an unresolved mass of peaks in the NMR spectrum.  My compound had 6 methylene groups, a total of 12 protons [aka hydrogens] in it and to my utter amazement 10 of the 12 were individually resolved with beautiful coupling features, which any synthetic organic chemist would swoon over. I also isolated crystals of the adduct and using X-ray crystallography unambiguously proved its structure while revealing its beautifully curved rings.

Another indelible memory is of Mallott Hall itself.  The Engler lab was on the 5th floor with our windows facing east and it used to crush me that in late spring, summer and early fall, scores of students will be sunning and enjoying themselves on the adjacent sloping lawn while we were stuck in the lab setting up reactions, listening to 80s hits on the radio and yearning to get out ….. but never could!