Biocatalysis in Organic Chemistry
Biocatalysis in Organic Chemistry
Dr. Jacobsens research area is organic chemistry, where the goal is to synthesize biologically active molecules. Enzymes are used as catalysts to synthesize enantiomerically pure biologically active compounds by kinetic resolution of racemic compounds or asymmetric synthesis of prochiral substances. Several master students are now working on chemo-enzymatic synthesis of enantiomerically pure drugs.
After 11 years of employment as an Analystical chemist and Quality manager in Lilleborg factories in her hometown Kristiansund, she obtained a Cand. Mag. Degree (Bachelor degree) from NTNU in 1996. She obtained a master's degree in Biotechnology at the Department of Chemistry in September 1999 and defended her PhD thesis in Organic Chemistry at the same department in May 2004. She was from 2004 to 2005 employed as a Senior engineer at the department, and from 2005 as Associate professor.
Her teaching subjects are General chemistry, Organic chemistry for undergraduate and advanced programs, Biocatalysis in Organic chemistry, Asymmetric Synthesis, Natural product chemistry, Chromatography and Spectroscopic methods.
From 2019 to 2022 she was the project manager for an EU project called GreenCAM; Green Chemistry for Advanced Materials in collaboration with the University of Bucharest, Romania. Colleagues at the Department of Chemical Process Engineering also participated in this project.
She has been involved in several EU-funded collaborations, f. inst. as MAnagement committee memmber in Systems Biocatalysis - which ended in 2017.
She is member of the Scientific Committee of the European Society of Applied Biocatalysis (ESAB) and since 2023 she is the Treasurer of the Board of ESAB.
From 2024 she has been Project manager in the project Sustainable Synthesis of Drug Targets, Machine Learning, Chemoenzymatic Resolution and Advancing Tech-transfer Chemical Education in India and Norway which is a collaboration with the Indian Institute of Technology, Indore, India. The project is funded by the Directorate of Higher Education and Competence (HK-dir), Norway and the University Grants Commission, India. My collaborator here is Professor Debayan Sarkar and the project has already involved several student and staff exchanges and participation in several international conferences.