Recent progress in Concerto molecular catalysis

讲座人简介：Prof Takao Ikariya completed his Ph.D. degreein 1976 at Tokyo Institute of Technology under the direction of Professor AkioYamamoto and then he was appointed as an assistant professor in the Departmentof Synthetic Chemistry at the University of Tokyo. He found chiral Ru-BINAPcomplex and successfully developed asymmetric hydrogenation with the Ru-BINAPcomplexes (a major contribution to Prof Noyori’s Nobel Prize in 2001). He spentone and a half years in 1979-1981 as a postdoctoral fellow in Professor RobertH. Grubbs' group (Nobel laureate, 2005) at Caltech. In 1985 he moved to thecentral research center of NKK corp., where he developed a carbonylationreaction of nitrobenzene leading to aromatic urethanes. In 1991, he joined inthe ERATO Molecular Catalysis Project of Japan Science and TechnologyCorporation, which was directed by Professor Ryoji Noyori (Nobel laureate,2001). Prof Ikariya was then promoted to a professor at Tokyo Institute ofTechnology in 1997. His current research interests include powerful andpractical molecular catalysis in both liquid solvents and supercritical fluids.