Chemistry is an indispensable discipline as well as a powerful platform for exploration and discovery that innovates the way we live. Catalysis, in particular, is at the heart of synthetic chemistry enabling access to organic molecules essential to our lives, such as pharmaceuticals, industrial and agricultural chemicals. While great strides have been made in catalysis, there has always been a demand for the evolution of catalysis due to the lengthy steps often required to prepare target structures and the upfront issues of sustainability, cost and practicality. In this regard, the major goal of the Lee research group is to create synthetic methods, reagents, and catalytic principles for direct and selective chemical transformations.

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   To this end, our research group will primarily focus on implementing efficient catalytic systems to trigger selective chemical-bond formation and cleavage underlying the C–C, C–N, C–S and C–O backbones of molecules. The initial success of selective chemical transformation will be ultimately linked to an optimization approach in medicinal chemistry, wherein structure-activity relationships are tuned in response to changes in the parent skeleton, for potential pharmaceutical applications. In our research program, we leverage seamless interdisciplinary collaborations on the principles of organic, organometallic and medicinal chemistry on the basis of fundamental mechanistic elucidation to build a novel catalytic platform that address significant selectivity challenges.