Professor Tabitha Wood 鈥� Playing scrabble with the Dohmori-Truce-Smiles rearrangement
Dr. Tabitha Wood received her Bachelor of Science in Chemistry in the honours program at the University of Winnipeg and her PhD in Chemistry from Dalhousie University, Halifax. After graduating in 2007, she completed her postdoctoral fellowship at the Ontario Cancer Institute. Dr. Wood is now an Associate Dean of Science at the University of Winnipeg, where she has focused her research in the WOOD Research Lab. She is an expert in synthetic organic methodology, which she describes as an amusing contrast of words given that synthetic means manmade while organic has the connotation of being from nature.
Her research program investigates a reaction known as the Dohmori-Truce-Smiles rearrangement, which is an aryl migration reaction that achieves the creation of new carbon-carbon bonds in an efficient manner. This becomes useful for the construction of the carbon skeletons that are characteristic of organic molecules. She invites you to think of these rearrangement reactions as anagrams and imagine that you are playing scrabble where you change the position of the letters to form new words. However, in chemistry you change the temperature, concentrations, reactants, or their arrangements to produce products in laboratory settings. Dr. Wood says that to gain understanding of a chemical reaction there must be a thorough investigation that involves testing the reaction in a variety of starting conditions and then analyzing the chemicals produced. She and her research team strive to illuminate the Dohmori-Truce-Smiles rearrangement and elevate it to the position of a reliable and useful synthetic reaction. By examining the scope of the reaction, they have been able to determine its generality and the limits of its tolerance for starting chemicals. In examining the substrate scope, a combination of wet lab experiments and computational molecular modeling work has given them the opportunity to test aspects of molecular structural design and investigate theoretical questions about the mechanism by which this reaction operates.
Dr. Wood's teaching includes courses like organic chemistry, biochemistry, molecular enzymology and drug design.