Chemistry of Plant Natural Products (PDF)

Professor Sunil Kumar Talapatra has taught stereochemistry, conformational analysis, reaction mechanisms and alkaloids in the postgraduate classes of Calcutta University (CU) and Presidency College (now University), Kolkata for more than three decades, and has been teaching stereochemistry for the last three decades in some other universities of W. Bengal and Tripura as a Guest teacher. He did PhD (CU) and post-doctoral work with Professor (Mrs) Asima Chatterjee and then post-doctoral work (4 yr) with Professor Michael P Cava at OSU, Columbus. Professor Talapatra's research contributions include the discovery, structure elucidation and stereochemistry of more than 100 new bioactive secondary metabolites (from medicinal plants), mostly alkaloids and terpenoids of different classes, coumarins and other polyphenolics, cardiac glycosides, one new C26  tetracyclic diamine from a marine sponge, synthesis and mechanisms. He was a Visiting Scientist at the Illinois U (Chicago), UCSC, and UCSD. As a UNESCO Senior Visiting Scientist (1982) he was briefly associated with Professors E J Corey, K Nakanishi, H Rapoport, J Meinwald, N Takahashi and Y Kanaoka. He participated in many International Conferences held worldwide. He supervised numerous PhD students and post-doctoral Fellows who joined Universities, IITK, Research Institutes, Colleges, and pursued their own teaching and research careers. The author of more than 175 research papers and a recipient of several awards, he was a British Council Guest Visitor (1973) in UK, under INSA and UGC Cultural Exchange Programmes in Hungary and Czechoslovakia and was elected FRIC (London) in 1974, President of the Indian Chemical Society (2002 & 2003), and has been a Vice-President of the Indian Science News Association since 2008.

Professor Bani Talapatra has taught natural products chemistry at Calcutta University (CU) for more than three decades, and in some other universities of W. Bengal and Tripura as a Guest