Research Interest
Complexity in organic molecules plays a central role in the pharmaceutical and agrochemical industries. Oftentimes, accessing these targets requires the use of specially tailored starting material, expensive catalysts, and lengthy routes. Transforming inexpensive and widely available feedstock chemicals under the catalysis of inexpensive, widely available metal salt and organocatalyst will make the chemical synthesis robust and sustainable. Both transition metal catalysis and organocatalysis have received extensive attention during the past few decades. Although both have distinct reactivities, they open new activation modes allowing for new reactivities when combined. Two different catalysts simultaneously activate both the electrophile and nucleophile and work synergistically to deliver product that are inaccessible by other means. Rendering this process enantioselective imposes another level of challenge which could be tackled by the judicial choice of chiral elements and designing new ligands/catalysts. Our group’s main effort will continue in this direction.