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Sustaining Curricula 2021 was a series of four interdisciplinary faculty panels at Barnard College that took place virtually in the Spring 2021 semester. Barnard’s Center for Engaged Pedagogy (CEP) planned this series with the Office of Sustainability and Climate Action and faculty to encourage professors to integrate climate action, sustainability, and the environment into their courses in authentic, inclusive, and justice-oriented ways and to cultivate a culture of interdisciplinary pedagogical exchange and collaboration. This chapter introduces the major themes of each panel and highlights the contributions of the faculty members to ongoing dialogues and discourses on ecological and pedagogical renewal in sustainability education across the curriculum.

The stereo- and regioselective total syntheses of OMe derivatives of the scarce bioactive meroterpenoids makassaric acid (1) and fascioquinol B (2) have been accomplished. The synthetic sequences are based on the following three efficient and selective catalytic reactions: Cu-catalyzed addition of Grignard compounds to an epoxide; a regioselective Barbier-type reaction, catalyzed by Cp2TiCl; and regio- and stereoselective bioinspired cyclization, also catalyzed by Cp2TiCl. These three key processes allow us to obtain the main skeletons of 1 and 2 in a few steps. The valuable synthetic proposal shown in this work provides fast access to scarce, structurally complex meroterpenes with promising biological activities, which are a sustainable source for later studies and applications in medicine.