David Crich

David Crich was born and raised in Chesterfield, England. He graduated from the University of Surrey with a B.Sc. in Chemistry with French in 1981 before joining the group of Sir Derek Barton at the Institut de Chimie des Substances Naturelles (ICSN) in Gif sur Yvette, France. Under Barton, he learned the rudiments of free radical chemistry and was responsible for the development of the Barton decarboxylation reaction, for which he was awarded the degree of Docteur ès Sciences by the Université de Paris XI (Orsay) in 1984.

After completion of his graduate studies, Crich spent an additional year at the ICSN, in which he completed a post-doc under the advisement of Barton and Pierre Potier. He subsequently began his independent career in 1985 as a lecturer in chemistry in the Christopher Ingold Laboratories of University College London where he continued to develop radical chemistry as well as his early work on carbohydrates. Professor Crich then joined the University of Illinois in 1990, quickly becoming a Distinguished Professor of Chemistry in 1994, before moving to Wayne State University in 2007 as the A. Paul and Carol C. Schaap Professor of Organic Chemistry. He briefly returned to the ICSN in 2009 as the institute's director, before rejoining Wayne State in 2011, where he remained until joining the University of Georgia as Georgia Research Alliance and David Chu Eminent Scholar in 2019.