Our program centers around the discovery of catalytic carbon-carbon and carbon-heteroatom bond forming reactions based on C-H activation.
Target transformations
are selected to enable 1) the use of simple and abundant starting materials
such as aliphatic acids, amines and alcohols, and 2) disconnections that
drastically shorten the synthesis of a class of biologically active compounds.
Ultimately,
we hope to develop catalytic reactions to parallel enzymatic transformations in
terms of reactivity and selectivity. To achieve this goal, our research
activities are directed towards the following main aspects: catalysis, chemoselectivity,
enantioselectivity and synthetic applications.
Catalysis
Development of practical approaches to achieve turnovers for metal-catalyzed C-H functionalizations is one of the most important tasks in our research program.
We have exploited a number of redox systems to close the catalytic cycle, namely,
Pd(II)/Pd(IV),
Pd(II)/Pd(0) and Cu(II)/Cu(0) catalysis.
Chemoselectivity
Since a
variety of C-H bonds in synthetically useful substrates are potentially
reactive with a C-H activation catalyst, it is crucial to achieve high
selectivity in order to apply these catalytic transformations to synthesis.
Enantioselectivity
