Imidazole and Benzimidazole Synthesis

M. Ross Grimmett was born in Dunedin, New Zealand, and he was educated at Otago and Massay Universities in New Zealand. His major research interests have been agolo allagladions and studies of nucleophilic substitution.

Alan Katritzky was educated at Oxford and has held faculty positions at Cambridge and East Anglia before he migrated in 1980 to the University of Florida, where he was Kenan Professor and Director for the Institute for Heterocyclic Compounds. During his career he has trained more than 1000 graduate students and post-docs, and lectured and consulted world-wide. He led the team, which produced “Comprehensive Heterocyclic Chemistry” and its sequels, "CHEC-II" and "CHEC-III”, has edited “Advances in Heterocyclic Chemistry, Vols. 1 through 111” and conceived the plan for “Comprehensive Organic Functional Group Transformations”. He founded Arkat-USA, a non-profit organization which publishes “Archive for Organic Chemistry” (ARKIVOC) an electronic journal completely free to authors and readers at (www.arkat-usa.org). Honors include 14 honorary doctorates from 11 countries and membership of foreign membership of the National Academies of Britain, Catalonia, India, Poland, Russia and Slovenia.