- Senior Research Fellowship in 2022 at Chinese University of Hong Kong
About Ying Yeung Yeung’s Work
Ying Yeung Yeung works in the fields of organocatalysis, drug synthesis, methodology, and green chemistry. His main research interest is the development of novel catalytic/asymmetric reactions, in particular electrophilic halogenation, based on small organic molecules as catalysts.
Professor Yeung also works on the development of heavy metal-free catalytic systems based on noncovalent interactions including halogen-bond, chalcogen-bond, and non-classical hydrogen-bond. These catalysts can easily be tuned using conventional methods to adapt different substrates. The newly developed catalytic protocols have been used in many reactions such as the asymmetric halocyclization of olefinic substrates, multicomponent cohalogenation, ortho-selective mono-halogenation of arenes in the synthesis of valuable bisphenol ligands, desymmetrizing asymmetric halospiroketalization, and acid-free transesterification. These green and metal-free methods allow the easy access of various building blocks and are useful in the production of fuels, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, dyes, pigments, and functional materials.
Professor Yeung’s works contribute not only to the fundamental understanding on catalysis, but also provide efficient accesses to many value-added compounds.
Biography
Ying Yeung Yeung is a Professor of Chemistry at The Chinese University of Hong Kong and was the Department Chair in the Department of Chemistry from 2016-2022. He was previously an Associate Professor at the National University of Singapore and was a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard University. He earned his BSc and PhD at the Department of Chemistry, CUHK.He has been a member in the State Key Laboratory of Synthetic Chemistry at The Chinese University of Hong Kong since 2020.