 Professor Zhengtao Xu Dr. Xu obtained BS from Beijing University (1996), MS from University of Michigan at Ann Arbor (1998), and Ph.D. from Cornell University (2001). He was a postdoc with David B. Mitzi at IBM T. J. Watson Research Center from 2001-2003. Dr. Xu was an assistant professor at the George Washington University from 2003 to 2005. He has been awarded the PRF Starter Grant from the American Chemical Society (2004), and he was a winner of the ORAU Ralph E. Powe Junior Faculty Enhancement Award in 2004. One of our current projects at City University of Hong Kong seeks to develop porous coordination networks as novel heterogeneous catalysts. Negishi went to Syracuse University as Assistant Professor in 1972 and began his life-long investigations of transition metal-catalyzed organometallic reactions for organic synthesis. His initial and largely unsuccessful attempts to develop a Cu-catalyzed conjugate addition or substitution reaction of organoboranes soon led him to adopt a then novel strategy of considering all 60 or so non-radioactive metals as components of both stoichiometric reagents and catalysts. During the 1976-1978 period he published about 10 papers describing the Pd- or Ni-catalyzed cross-coupling reactions of various organometals including those of Mg, Zn, B, Al, Sn, and Zr. Today, those involving Zn, Al, and Zr are called the Negishi coupling. His success in developing the Pd- or Ni-catalyzed alkenylzirconiums was the beginning of many series of his subsequent investigations of organozirconium chemistry leading to the discoveries and developments of the Zr-catalyzed alkyne carboalumination often called the Negishi alkyne carboalumination (1978- ), the Zr-catalyzed asymmetric alkene carboalumination (ZACA reaction) (1995-), and the chemistry of low-valent zirconocenes generated via nBu2ZrCp2 and other dialkylzirconocenes widely known as the Negishi reagents (1985- ). Negishi was promoted to Associate Professor at Syracuse University in 1976 and invited back to Purdue University as Full Professor in 1979. In 1999 he was appointed the inaugural H. C. Brown Distinguished Professor of Chemistry. Various awards he has received include Guggenheim Fellowship (1987), the 1996 A. R. Day Award, a 1996 Chemical Society of Japan Award, the 1998 ACS Organometallic Chemistry Award, a Humboldt Senior Researcher Award, Germany (1998 - 2001), the 2000 RSC Sir E. Frankland Prize, the 2007 Yamada-Koga Prize, the ACS Award for Creative Work in Synthetic Organic Chemistry (2010). At Purdue University, he was the recipient of the 1998 McCoy Award and the 2003 Sigma Xi Award. Negishi has published over 400 publications including two books, one of which is Handbook of Organopalladium Chemistry for Organic Synthesis, 2 Vols., Negishi, E., Ed., Wiley-Interscience, New York, 2002, 3279 pp., and several patents. Collectively, these publications including two books have been cited over 19,000 times (H-index of 69). Negishi has been cited in Marquis Who's Who in America and Marquis Who's Who in the World. The Negishi coupling has been cited in Merck Index (2001- ). |
