For my life, I would like to benefit society by improving human health with my expertise in organic chemistry. I marvel at the world of molecules. Molecules are tiny in size, but they are the keys in understanding many scientific phenomena. Believing it is important to know how to make molecules, I have worked in organic synthesis labs: the Jamison lab when I was a freshman, where I conducted photoredox catalysis development, and the Buchwald lab right now where I’m exploring a new reactivity of CuH catalysis.
With the interest in molecules, I would like to contribute in achieving a longer and healthier human life in which still a great promise for organic chemistry lies. No one would deny that there has been a transformative progress in organic synthesis during the last century. We now possess an arsenal of reactions with unprecedented scope, yield and selectivity. Marvelous as the development is, equally perplexing is an article* that reveals there have been almost no changes in the list of the most-used-reactions in drug making for the last two decades. Instead of many state-of-art reactions that require expensive materials and harsh conditions, old reactions with high commercial availability have still been dominating the industry. My ultimate goal is to fill the gap between organic synthetic labs and pharmaceutical companies by improving the state-of-art reactions so that they can be performed with minimal resource, effort, and time.
*Brown, D.G.; Bostrom, J. An analysis of past and present synthetic methodologies on medicinal chemistry; Where have all the new reactions gone?. J. Med. Chem., 2016, 59 (10), pp 4443-4458