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)             More is coming …

 

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

Metal-supported NCR was employed to engender exquisite selectivity in amination reactions.

i)             The concept of directed homolytic aromatic substitution (HAS) with iron-aminyl radical is introduced and demonstrated in ortho-selective aromatic C–H amination (Nat. Catal. 2024,7, 636–645 ). 

ii)        Directed HAS was successfully employed for C-7 selective NH₂ amination of indoles (Angew. Chem. Int. Ed.  2024, 63, e202412103).

iii)        Iron-catalysed stereoselective NH transfer enables dynamic kinetic resolution of sulfoxides via photoredox/iron catalysis relay (Nat. Commun. 2025, 16, 1471).

iv)        More is coming …