Shu-Li You was born in Henan, China, and received his BSc in chemistry from Nankai Univ. (1996). He obtained his PhD from Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry (SIOC) in 2001 under the supervision of Prof. Lixin Dai before carrying out postdoctoral studies with Prof. Jeffery Kelly at The Scripps Research Institute. From 2004, he worked at the Genomics Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation as a PI before returning to SIOC as a Professor in 2006. He was elected an Academician of CAS in 2023. His research interests mainly focus on asymmetric C-H functionalization and catalytic asymmetric dearomatization (CADA) reactions. Professor You has published over 430 research papers in internationally peer-reviewed journals (>36000 citations; h-index: 106). He is the recipient of AstraZeneca Excellence in Chemistry Award (2011), RSC Merck Award (2015), Ho Leung Ho Lee Foundation Prize for Scientific and Technological Innovation (2016), State Natural Science Award (2nd class) (2017), Xplorer Prize (2019), Yoshida Prize (2024), and Eun Lee Lectureship Award (2025). Prof. You has been an Associate Editor for JACS since 2021.
## 讲座简介
Dearomatization reactions are widely recognized as powerful methods for the synthesis of highly functionalized three-dimensional structures from simple planar aromatic compounds. However, due to the extra stability of “aromaticity” of the arenes, their dearomatization reactions with good enantioselective control have been a great challenge.
In this talk, we present our results toward the development of new dearomatization reactions, with particular focus on visible-light-driven excited-state dearomatization reactions. Diverse aromatic compounds, including naphthalenes, have been converted to (partially) saturated cyclic scaffolds. The practical utility of these methods is exemplified by concise total syntheses of natural products. These results provide not only the efficient synthesis of diverse enantioenriched spiro- or polycycles, but also a novel concept in synthetic methodology development.
