The Wang Laboratory in the college of chemistry at Nankai university seeks to address challenges in the realm of organic synthesis by designing new strategies and catalysts. We are pursuing novel strategies to tame and deploy the radical intermediates, historically recognized as highly reactive, but uncontrollable species, for the assembly of useful structures in a selective manner. Electrocatalysis, photoredox catalysis and transition metal catalysis are leveraged for mild generation and selective transformation of these open shell intermediates, and converting various readily accessible feedstocks, such as alkane, alkenes and arenes, to important building blocks and pharmacophores. Radical-mediated (enantio)selective amination are currently of particular interest to our group.

 

Research themes in the Wang Laboratory include,

 

1.    Developing new strategies and reagents for nitrogen centered radical (NCR) formation.

i)      Aliphatic azide is utilized as aminium radical precursor in the presence of (TMS)3Si–H under acidic conditions that enables an efficient anti-Markovnikov hydroamination of unactivated alkenes for dialkylamine synthesis. (J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2022, 144, 16316-16324)

ii)         meta-Selective C−H amination of aryl amines via protonation-enabled polarity inversion in homolytic aromatic substitution (HAS).(CCS Chem. 2025, doi/10.31635/ccschem.025.202506113.)

iii)        More is coming …

 

2.    Taming NCR with metal catalyst for (enantio)selective amination.

i)        The concept of directed homolytic aromatic substitution (HAS) with iron-aminyl radical is introduced and demonstrated in site-selective aromatic C–H amination (Nat. Catal. 2024,7, 636–645; Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2024, 63, e202412103; Chem. Sci. 2025, DOI: 10.1039/D5SC03780H). 

ii)        Iron-catalysed stereoselective NH transfer to heteroatom center (Nat. Commun. 2025, 16, 1471).

iii)       Iron-aminyl radical is employed for aminative functionalization of alkenes (Nat. Commun. 2025, 16, 3168; ACS Catal. 2025, 15, 17844−17855).

iv)         More is coming …