Introduction

The Department of Organic Chemistry was founded in 1957 and its first head was Prof. Ottó Clauder. The infrastructure of the Department (the students' and tutors' laborato-ries, the equipment for preparative work and the library) was gradually built up and finally a spectroscopic unit was established. In 1977, Prof. László Szabó took over as head of the De-partment. The present head of the Department since 1997 is Prof. Péter Mátyus.

In the following post the aim and structure of the teaching and research activities are summerired.

The aim of the education in organic chemistry is to create an organic chemical basis for subsequent subjects in the curriculum of students at the Faculty of Pharmacy. To attain this goal, besides the main lectures (120 hours in the 3rd and 4th semesters) and parallel laboratory practicals (165 hours) in organic chemistry, the Department offers a choice of special courses to its students (Advanced Organic Chemistry, Computational Chemistry and QSAR Methods, Physical Organic Chemistry and Bioorganic Chemistry). The teaching activities at the De-partment also include the introduction of selected students into research in organic and me-dicinal chemistry, the direction of diploma work and participation in the postgraduate (Ph.D.) education. The Department takes part in several international research and educational coop-eration programmes (such as ERASMUS).

The Department additionally plays an important role in the postgraduate education of pharmacists, as organizer of the Medicinal Chemistry Programme, and offers a two-year post-graduate programme in Drug Research and Development.
The main research fields at the Department are the synthesis and chemical properties of diazines, including some natural products. In the last few years, important results have been achieved in the fields of synthesis strategies, including palladium-catalysed cross-coupling re-actions of pyridazines and uracils, and mechanistic studies and the synthetic development of certain thermal rearrangement reactions. Another research field at the Department involves medicinal chemistry with the design and synthesis of antiarrhythmic compounds, ligands of ?-adrenoceptors and inhibitors of semicarbazide-sensitive amine-oxidase. The research work is facilitated by separation, spectroscopic and computational methods.
The Department cooperates in both research and education with several academic (e.g. the Semmelweis University Department of Pharmacodynamics and Department of Pharmacol-ogy and Pharmacotherapy; the University of Szeged; the University of Debrecen; the Hungar-ian Academy of Sciences Chemical Research Centre; Peter Pazmany Catholic University Faculty of Information Technology, Institute of Experimental Medicine of the Hungarian Academy of Science, the University of Vienna, Milan, Palermo, Cagliari and Antwerp); and industrial (Richter Gedeon and EGIS) organizations.