Congratulations Dr. Fan!

8th September 2014 – Xinyuan Fan, PhD student under the supervision of Prof. Miquel A. Pericàs, has defended his PhD Thesis entitled “Towards More Sustainable Chemical Processes: Studies on Covalent and Non-covalent Catalyst Immobilization” (assigned to the Organic and Analytical Chemistry Department of the Universitat Rovira i Virgili) publicly on September 5th at the ICIQ auditorium.

The members or his evaluation committee were: Prof. Antonio M. Echavarren (ICIQ), Prof. Albert Moyano (University of Barcelona) and Prof. Patrick J. Walsh (University of Pennsylvania).

Dr. Fan with his supervisor, Prof. Miquel A. Pericàs, and the evaluation committee

Abstract:

The present thesis describes three means to achieve sustainable catalytic processes: design and synthesis of effective homogeneous catalysts, development of reusable heterogeneous catalysts, development of precatalysts or one pot multistep cascade models for convenient transformations.

General introduction in Chapter 1 is to familiarize the readers with the concepts, background and mechanisms used in this thesis. This is followed by Chapter 2, which describes α-amination of aldehydes catalyzed by a reusable polymer supported diphenylprolinol silyl ether, and its application in continuous flow processes. Two examples in Chapter 3 demonstrate cascade reactions facilitated by site-isolated catalysts. Development of a novel and effective organocatalyst is described in Chapter 4. Finally, in Chapter 5, a convenient precatalyst for Shibasaki’s bifunctional catalysts is developed, while studying in parallel the effect of supported ligands to anchor these catalysts.