[Fri. 17 Jun. 2016] Prof. Jianwei Sun/Remote Control in Brønsted Acid Catalysis: New Strategies for the Synthesis of Chiral Building Blocks and Medium Rings

“Remote Control in Brønsted Acid Catalysis:

New Strategies for the Synthesis of Chiral Building Blocks and Medium Rings”

Recent development of new organic reactions that take advantage of organic catalysts has received considerable attention. Among them, Brønsted acids have been demonstrated to be particularly versatile, providing new modes stereocontrol that sometimes may not be straightforward to achieve by metal catalysis. In this talk, I will introduce our recent progress in the development of several new strategies for the synthesis of chiral building blocks that involve efficient remote stereocontrol by chiral Brønsted acids. Another topic is the efficient assembly of medium rings, which is a longstanding challenge in organic synthesis. Employing oxetane and oxetenium as the key unit in the substrates/intermediates, we have developed several efficient strategies for the synthesis of medium rings by Brønsted and Lewis acid catalysis. 

Prof. Jianwei Sun

Department of Chemistry, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong