Thieme Chemistry Journal Awardees

Join us on Thursday, July 17, 2025 at 10:00 AM CEST for a special Cheminar hosted by Thieme, featuring the 2025 Thieme Journal Awardees. This event will be chaired by Prof. Xin-Yuan Liu, Synthesis board member and Chair Professor at the Southern University of Science and Technology. We’re proud to host three outstanding early-career researchers, recognized for their contributions to the field of synthetic chemistry, catalysis and materials science: 🔹 Dr. Adam Noble, University of Bristol 🔹 Dr. Allegra Franchino, Durham University 🔹 Dr. Stephen Fielden, University of Birmingham Don’t miss your chance to hear from these rising stars in synthetic chemistry and discover their work. Sulfoxylate as a Redox Activator for Photoinduced Generation of Ketyl Radicals from Carbonyls Ketyl radicals are valuable intermediates that allow carbonyl chemistry to be extended beyond traditional electrophilic reactivity. However, accessing them by single-electron reduction of carbonyls requires strongly reducing conditions. This talk will focus on our development of an alternative strategy to access ketyl radicals from aldehydes that avoids the reduction pathway, instead proceeding via single-electron oxidation and desulfination of in situ-generated α-hydroxy sulfinates. Merging H-bond donors and gold(I) catalysis Chloride abstraction to activate gold–chloride precatalysts is routinely performed employing silver(I) salts. However, they can be problematic due to light sensitivity, hygroscopicity, redox activity and interference with the desired gold chemistry, which would otherwise be water- and air-tolerant. Self-activating gold(I) chloride complexes have emerged as a promising alternative, but they still suffer from much lower activity and narrower applicability than Ag(I) salts. In this talk, I will present a new class of self-activating phosphine Au(I) chloride complexes, featuring an anthracenyl bisurea as a quintuple H-bond donor. The best complex performs well in several intra- and intermolecular Au(I)-catalysed reactions, in the absence of any additive. Its catalytic activity is comparable to the one imparted by traditional inorganic chloride scavengers, such as sodium tetrakis3,5-bis(trifluoromethyl)phenylborate. Mechanistic studies shows that the exceptional H-bond donor ability of the bisurea unlocks access to a zwitterionic catalyst resting state where the Au–Cl bond has been cleaved, thus significantly reducing reaction barriers for catalysis. The principles uncovered by our work enable for the first time H-bond donors to compete with inorganic chloride scavengers in terms of activity and generality. Systems Chemistry of polymer nanoparticles Contemporary methods of polymerization have made it possible to construct sequence polymers, including block copolymers, with high precision. These copolymers can be designed to assemble in solution and produce nano- and microparticles of various shapes and sizes. Such assembly often occurs under kinetic control, meaning particles are formed in a nonequilibrium state. This leads to a rich variety of behaviours being observed in block copolymer assemblies, such as pathway dependence (e.g., thermal history), nonergodicity and responsiveness. In this talk I will present several studies concerning polymer assemblies. These include the kinetically controlled hetero-fusion between two populations of unfunctionalised nanoparticles. Here, fusion extent can be tuned simply by adjusting polymer length. We probed fusion using an elemental tag for cryogenic scanning transmission electron microscopy combined with electron energy loss spectroscopy (cryo-STEM-EELS). Our results demonstrate emergence of a complex process when populations of synthetic nanoparticles are combined. We anticipate systems-level behaviour that results from such processes will be fashioned as an elementary mechanism of synthetic communication that enables future materials and technologies.