Professor Tehshik Yoon
Department of Chemistry
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Stereocontrol in Photochemical Reactions
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 Brønsted acid scaffolds to control both the absolute and relative stereo- chemistry 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.
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 photo catalysts 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)
331 Smith Hall