Event
Chemical Society Seminar: Tehshik Yoon- Stereocontrol in Photochemical Reactions
Tuesday, March 11, 2025 13:00to14:30
Maass Chemistry Building
OM 10, 801 rue Sherbrooke Ouest, Montreal, QC, H3A 0B8, CA
Abstract:
Photochemistry is intriguing as a synthetic tool because the absorption of light by an organic molecule results in the formation of exceptionally energetic reactive intermediates that can react in ways that are inaccessible to ground-state molecules. However, this high reactivity is also a challenge for stereoselective synthesis: control over the stereochemistry of photochemical reactions, particularly using enantioselective catalysts, has been a long-standing challenging synthetic problem with few general solutions. We recently developed a strategy that utilizes privileged chiral Br酶nsted acid scaffolds to control both the absolute and relative stereochemistry of complex [2+2] photocycloadditions. These reactions have enabled a general, concise, and stereocontrolled strategy for the synthesis of the truxinate and truxillate natural products.
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Bio:
Tehshik Yoon is a Professor of Chemistry at the University of Wisconsin鈥揗adison. He received his bachelor's degree in chemistry from Harvard University, where he performed undergraduate research with Prof. David Evans, and his master's degree from Caltech under the supervision of Prof. Erick Carreira. His Ph.D. thesis with Prof. David MacMillan, first at Berkeley and then at Caltech, focused on the development of chiral Lewis acids for enantioselective Claisen rearrangements. After finishing graduate school in 2002, he became an NIH postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Prof. Eric Jacobsen at Harvard, where his research involved the development of a hydrogen bond-donating catalyst for asymmetric nitro-Mannich reactions.
Tehshik has been on the faculty at UW鈥揗adison since 2005. His research group has broad interests in organic synthesis and catalysis. In particular, the Yoon group has been pioneering the use of transition metal photocatalysts in synthetically useful transformations promoted by visible light. Tehshik's efforts in teaching and research have earned him a variety of prestigious of awards, including an NSF CAREER Award (2007), the Research Corporation Cottrell Scholar Award (2008), the Beckman Young Investigator Award (2008), the Amgen Young Investigator Award (2009), an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship (2009), an Eli Lilly Grantee Award (2011), a Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Award from the Humboldt Foundation (2015), and an ACS Cope Scholar Award (2019).