Hans Paulsen, Professor Emeritus, University of Hamburg, Germany, passed away on October 3, 2024. “His clear thinking and subtle sense of humor will be missed,” reads the obituary by the family.

Professor Paulsen’s research focused on carbohydrate chemistry. He worked, for example, on the synthesis of complex oligosaccharides, biologically active glycoproteins that are relevant in the context of, e.g., cancer or HIV, the use of NMR spectroscopy for the structural assignment of complex carbohydrates, and carboxonium compounds in carbohydrate chemistry.

 

Hans Paulsen, born in Hamburg in 1922, received his Ph.D. from the University of Hamburg in 1955 under the supervision of Kurt Heyns. After habilitating at the same university in 1962, he was a Professor at the University of Hamburg from 1968 to 1972, and Chair of Natural Product Chemistry at the University of Hamburg from 1972 to1987. From 1986 to 2006, he was a member of the Joachim Jungius Society of Sciences in Hamburg.

Among many other honors, Hans Paulsen received the Emil Fischer Medal of the German Chemical Society (GDCh) in 1980, the Haworth Memorial Medal of the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) in 1983, the Claude S. Hudson Award of the American Chemical Society (ACS) in 1985, the Heyrovský Medal of the Czech Academy of Sciences in 1989, the Bijvoet Medal in 1993, and the RIKEN Eminent Scientist Award in 1996.

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Selected Publications

• Site directed processing: Role of amino acid sequences and glycosylation of acceptor glycopeptides in the assembly of extended mucin type O-glycan core 2,
  Inka Brockhausen, Thomas Dowler, Hans Paulsen,
  Biochim. Biophys. Acta Gen. Subj. 2009, 1790, 1244–1257.
  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bbagen.2009.05.020
• Identification of a novel cancer-specific immunodominant glycopeptide epitope in the MUC1 tandem repeat,
  Mads A. Tarp, Anne Louise Sørensen, Ulla Mandel, Hans Paulsen, Joy Burchell, Joyce Taylor-Papadimitriou, Henrik Clausen,
  Glycobiology 2007, 17, 197–209.
  https://doi.org/10.1093/glycob/cwl061
• UDP-Gal: GlcNAc-R β1,4-galactosyltransferase—a target enzyme for drug design. Acceptor specificity and inhibition of the enzyme,
  Inka Brockhausen, Melinda Benn, Shridhar Bhat, Sandra Marone, John G. Riley, Pedro Montoya-Peleaz, Jason Z. Vlahakis, Hans Paulsen, John S. Schutzbach, Walter A. Szarek,
  Glycoconj. J. 2006, 23, 525–541.
  https://doi.org/10.1007/s10719-006-7153-x
• Bausteine von Oligosacchariden, XXX. Neue effektive β-Glycosidsynthese für Mannose-Glycoside Synthesen von Mannose-haltigen Oligosacchariden,
  Hans Paulsen, Oswald Lockhoff,
  Chem. Ber. 2006, 114, 3102–3114.
  https://doi.org/10.1002/cber.19811140916
• Advances in Selective Chemical Syntheses of Complex Oligosaccharides,
  Hans Paulsen,
  Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. Engl. 2003, 21, 155–173.
  https://doi.org/10.1002/anie.198201553
• Syntheses, Conformations and X-Ray Structure Analyses of the Saccharide Chains from the Core Regions of Glycoproteins,
  Hans Paulsen,
  Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. Engl. 2003, 29, 823–839.
  https://doi.org/10.1002/anie.199008233
• Synthesis of complex oligosaccharide chains of glycoproteins,
  Hans Paulsen,
  Chem. Soc. Rev. 1984, 13, 15–45.
  https://doi.org/10.1039/cs9841300015