In plain words
Making a useful molecule — say, an ingredient of a medicine — often takes many steps, each with high temperatures, strong chemicals and a lot of waste. Plants do complicated chemistry using nothing but sunlight. Photoredox catalysis borrows that idea: a small amount of a light-absorbing catalyst grabs energy from a lamp and passes it on to the molecules we want to change.
This lets us build new chemical bonds at room temperature, in fewer steps, often without expensive metals.
The science
- Visible-light photoredox catalysis for C–H functionalisation and C–N bond formation.
- Organic photocatalysts — metal-free dyes designed in-house to replace iridium and ruthenium complexes.
- Transition-metal catalysed C–H activation and cross-coupling (Ru, Pd, Ni, Co).
- Photoinduced borylation and cascade reactions to build heterocycles.
What we’re working on now
New organic photocatalysts and visible-light cascade reactions, including routes to heterocyclic scaffolds of interest to medicinal chemistry.