CANCELLED: Professor Tehshik Yoon
Professor Tehshik Yoon
Department of Chemistry
University of Wisconsin–Madison
Host: Professor Courtney Roberts
Base Metals in Photoredox Oxidation Reactions
Photocatalysis offers a uniquely facile strategy for the generation of a wide variety of open-shell intermediates, and the development of new photoredox transformations based upon their reactivity has been a major theme of research in the past decade. This broad effort has led to the development of a remarkable variety of net redox-neutral and, to a lesser extent, net-reductive transformations of significant synthetic utility. The development of net-oxidative photoredox transformations, in contrast, has been somewhat slower, due to the incompatibility of photoredox conditions with many of the terminal oxidants that are ideally suited to ground-state oxidative catalysis. We propose that simple base metal salts are inexpensive, earth-abundant, and environmentally benign terminal oxidants that readily support the one-electron oxidation state changes typical of photoredox reactions. Their incorporation into the design of photoredox reactions enable a broad range of useful net oxidative photochemical transformations.
Tehshik Yoon
Tehshik Yoon is a Professor of Chemistry at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He earned his Ph.D. with Prof. David MacMillan, first at Berkeley and then at Caltech. After finishing graduate school in 2002, he became an NIH postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Prof. Eric Jacobsen at Harvard. Tehshik has been on the faculty at UW–Madison 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).
