John Taylor Groves

John T. Groves is the Hugh Stott Taylor Chair of Chemistry at Princeton University. He is a bioorganic and bioinorganic chemist who is recognized for his work with transition metal-containing enzymes and synthetic molecules that mimic their catalytic processes.  He is best known for his mechanistic studies of the drug metabolizing enzyme cytochrome P450, related metalloporphyrin redox catalysts and reactive oxometalloporphyrin intermediates. Groves was born and grew up in the New York City suburbs. He graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a degree in chemistry and received a doctorate in organic chemistry from Columbia University. He was a member of the chemistry faculty at the University of Michigan before coming to Princeton University in 1985, where he served as chair of the department of chemistry.

Using a variety of spectroscopic, kinetic and molecular probes, Groves studies mechanisms of oxygen activation in metalloenzymes. Small molecule models of redox enzyme active sites are also studied by the same techniques. He and his laboratory were the first to prepare and characterized high-valent metalloporphyrin complexes with oxo ligands. Such species are now recognized as the key reactive intermediates formed during drug metabolism by cytochrome P450 enzymes and more generally in the conversion of oxygen to water during respiration. Novel heme-contaiing enzymes of fungal origin have been shown react in ways that are similar to human P450 proteins. Recently, Groves and his group have devised new methods to incorporate fluorine into unreactive C-H bonds using manganese catalysts. Current interests include how such aliphatic fluorination reactions may be useful for the creation of a new generation of drug molecules and molecular probes for positron emission imaging applied to medical applications.