Green Chemistry and Technology

Biography

Prof. Wei Zhang is the Director of the Center for Green Chemistry at the University of Massachusetts Boston. He had positions of Research Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh, Senior Chemist at DuPont Agricultural Products, and Director of Discovery Chemistry at Fluorous Technologies, Inc. (FTI). His research is in the areas of green chemistry, fluorous chemistry, synthetic free radicals, organocatalysis, and medicinal chemistry. He has published over 180 peer-reviewed papers including three Chem. Rev. and four Tetrahedron Reports, and a book “Green techniques for organic and medicinal applications” (Willey 2012 & 2017). He is currently severing as editor and editorial advisory member on seven international journals including ACS Combinatorial Science and Green Processing and Synthesis. He received the International Fluorous Technology Award in 2015.            

Abstract

This presentation highlights our recent effort on the development of fluorous chemistry based pot-economic synthesis and asymmetric catalysis to maximize reaction and separation efficiency in the synthesis of diverse heterocyclic scaffolds with substitution, skeleton, and stereochemistry variations. Fluorous recyclable organocatalyst-promoted cascade reactions have been introduced for asymmetric fluorination, Michael addition, Mannich reaction, Robinson annulation and other transformations to construct drug-like molecules with multiple stereocenters. Screening of compounds for druggable targets such bromodomains, kinases, RORgt, and HIV-1 will be mentioned.