Richmond Sarpong

Biosketch

Richmond Sarpong is a Professor of Chemistry at the University of California Berkeley where he and his group specialize in synthetic organic chemistry. Richmond became interested in chemistry after seeing, firsthand, the effectiveness of the drug ivermectin in combating river blindness during his childhood in Ghana, West Africa. Richmond described his influences and inspirations in a TEDxBerkeley talk in 2015 (Face of Disease in Sub-Saharan Africa – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIsY87-zkXA). Richmond completed his undergraduate studies at Macalester College in St. Paul, MN and his graduate work was carried out with Prof. Martin Semmelhack at Princeton. He conducted postdoctoral studies at Caltech with Prof. Brian Stoltz. He enjoys teaching and was the recipient of the 2009, 2024, and 2025 UC Berkeley Department of Chemistry teaching awards, the 2016 Noyce Prize for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in the Physical Sciences at Berkeley, and the 2021 ACS-DOC Edward Leete Award for teaching and research.

Research Interests

At Berkeley, Richmond’s laboratory focuses on the synthesis of bioactive complex organic molecules including natural products. His laboratory designs strategies for the chemical synthesis of natural products and also develops methods to implement these strategies. Recently, his group has been developing methods for C–C bond cleavage/functionalization as well as methods that remodel the core of molecules including single-atom skeletal editing reactions. These advances in chemical synthesis may set the stage for discovering organic molecules with properties that may make them suitable for understanding biological systems, setting the stage for the discovery of new pharmaceuticals.