K. C. Nicolaou was born on July 5, 1946, in
Karavas, Cyprus where he grew up and went to school until the age of 18. In 1964, he went to England where he spent two years learning English and preparing to enter University. He studied chemistry at the
University of London (B.Sc., 1969,
Bedford College;
Ph.D. 1972,
University College London, with Professors F. Sondheimer and P. J. Garratt). In 1972, he moved to the United States and, after postdoctoral appointments at
Columbia University (1972–1973, Professor T. J. Katz) and
Harvard University (1973–1976, Professor
E. J. Corey), he joined the faculty at the
University of Pennsylvania where he became the Rhodes-Thompson Professor of Chemistry. While at Penn, he won the
Sloan Fellowship. In 1989, he relocated to San Diego, where he took up a joint appointment at the
University of California,
San Diego, where he served as Professor of Chemistry, and
The Scripps Research Institute, where he was Darlene Shiley Professor of Chemistry and Chairman of the Department of Chemistry. In 1996, he was appointed Aline W. and L.S. Skaggs Professor of Chemical Biology in The Skaggs Institute for Chemical Biology, The Scripps Research Institute. From 2005 to 2011, he directed Chemical Synthesis Laboratory @ ICES-A*STAR, Singapore. In 2013, Nicolaou moved to
Rice University. The Nicolaou group is active in the field of
organic chemistry with research interests in methodology development and
total synthesis. He is responsible for the synthesis of many complex molecules found in nature, such as
Taxol and
vancomycin. His group's route to
Taxol, completed in 1994 at roughly the same time as a
synthesis by the group of
Robert A. Holton, attracted national
news media attention due to
Taxol's structural complexity and its potent anti-cancer activity. ==Total syntheses accomplished==