Research

Research

Research Summary of Prof. Shou-Fei Zhu’s Group

  The hydrogen transfer processes are ubiquitous in catalytic organic reactions and many of them involving in the rate-determining or selectivity-determining steps. The development of efficient catalysts for controlling of hydrogen transfer in organic reactions is of critical for improving their efficiency but is still a significant challenge nowadays. Our group mainly studied three kinds of catalytic organic synthesis reactions with hydrogen transfer as the key step. We proposed the concept of "chiral proton shuttle catalyst", which realized a variety of challenging asymmetric proton transfer reactions. We developed a catalytic B-H bond insertion reaction, which provides a new opportunity for the structural diversity synthesis of organic boron. We developed a variety of new catalysts for hydride transfer reactions, which improved synthetic efficiency of many pharmaceuticals. The above findings have triggered the follow-up research from famous research institutions and been used in the production of chiral drugs by well-known pharmaceutical companies.