Upon returning to Berkeley, he joined the laboratory of Prof. Henry Rapoport and conducted undergraduate research in his group for nearly three years, the majority of which was under the tutelage of William D. Lubell (now at the University of Montreal).
A Fulbright Scholarship supported ten months of research in Prof. Steven A. Benner’s laboratories at the ETH in Zürich, Switzerland, and thereafter he undertook his PhD studies at Harvard University with Prof. Stuart L. Schreiber.
Developing effective and reliable continuous flow protocols to improve reaction yield, selectivity and minimize safety risks relative to batch conditions.
Streamlining multi-step processes: telescoping two or three step reactions into a single, continuous and uninterrupted reactor network to circumvent the need for isolation and/or purification of intermediates.
We have discovered a variety of coupling reactions to join a number of different functional groups in highly regio–, stereo– and enantioselective fashion depending on the nature of the supporting ligands on nickel.
For example, we have found that nickel–catalyzed reactions are compatible with a wide array of functional groups, making them useful in complex settings, such as fragment coupling or macrocyclization operations at a late stage in synthesis.