Junqi Li

Junqi received her B.Sc. and M.Sc. in chemistry from National University of Singapore. She completed her graduate studies with Professor Martin Burke at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 2015, where she focused on developing a more systematized approach for automating small molecule synthesis via iterative coupling of MIDA boronate building blocks. She subsequently pursued her postdoctoral work under the joint supervision of Professors Dean Toste and Scott Miller at University of California, Berkeley and Yale University, working on enantio- and site-selective reactions with phosphoric acid catalysts. She will be joining the chemistry faculty at Iowa State University in August 2019.

Research areas: Molecular editing with transition-metal catalysis and organocatalysis

Research interest:

The constant search for new chemical entities for the treatment of diseases necessitates the development of chemical synthesis methods that can rapidly access derivatives of complex small molecule structures.

Research in the group is centered on developing new molecular editing strategies with transition-metal complexes and organocatalysts. More specifically, the group is interested in 1) functional group editing by enabling methylene-heteroatom exchanges to modify hydrocarbon frameworks; and 2) scaffold editing by designing new organocataysts for product-selective transformations from a common intermediate to access topologically complex natural product-like scaffolds.

Email: junqili@iastate.edu