By Marianne Meadahl
 
A love for the way basic building blocks can create complex molecular structures has landed chemistry grad student Bal Kang (above) a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship worth more than US $270,000.

The prestigious research award, part of the Marie Curie Actions Program of the European Commission, allows postdoctoral fellows to carry out advanced training at a leading research institution.

Kang will spend the next two years at Oxford further developing his methods for creating pharmaceutically useful drug compounds.

The first graduate student to work in SFU professor Rob Britton’s research lab, Kang has already devised new methods to synthesize natural products aimed at protecting crops and fighting disease in humans.

Kang arrived in the Britton’s lab after completing his bachelor’s degree in science at UBC and working at a pair of local pharmaceutical companies, Cardiome and ActivePass Pharmaceuticals.

While at Cardiome his work on the process development of anti-arrhythmia drug Vernakalent led to its commercialization.

Kang has garnered more than $450,000 in grant and award funds to nearly half a million dollars while at SFU.

They include a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) CGS-D Alexander Graham Bell Scholarship, a Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research Senior Fellowship an SFU Graduate Fellowship. He also received an SFU President’s Research Stipend, allowing him to participate in numerous international conferences.

At Oxford, he’ll be looking to discover new chemical transformations that allow complex molecular “scaffolds” to be constructed “in their most straightforward and economically viable manner.”

“My long term goal is to come back to Canada to apply the new skills learned to transfer knowledge into a new generation of scientists,” he says.

Kang is putting the final touches on his thesis and plans to graduate in June before heading for Oxford in July.