Bakthan Singaram is a professor of organic chemistry at the University of California, Santa Cruz in Santa Cruz, California, where he has taught since 1989. Singaram's primary focus is in the area of boron-based organic chemistry. He gained his Ph.D. from the University of Madras, Tamil Nadu, India in 1977. Singaram also worked in and directed the laboratory of Nobel Prize-winning chemist Herbert Brown, who shared the 1979 Nobel prize in chemistry 1979 with Georg Wittig "for their development of the use of boron- and phosphorus-containing compounds, respectively, into important reagents in organic synthesis".^[1] Singaram then left the Brown research group to take a position as an assistant professor in 1989 at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he remains today. Singaram has also acted as a visiting professor at several universities, such as the University of Puerto Rico and the University of Rennes 1 in Rennes, France. Most recently, he received an award from The Boron in the Americas (BORAM) Organization presented at the Regular BORAM Awards in June 2012.^[2][3]

Singaram's laboratory is interested in the synthesis and reactions in boron-containing molecules as well as in the development of asymmetric and stereoselective methods for the synthesis of organic molecules.