About us

The major research efforts of our synthetically oriented group are directed toward the asymmetric catalysis of currently not feasible or not generally applicable transformations. Learning from mother nature, we develop enzyme-mimetic catalysts, which are intended to activate both reactants simultaneously thus allowing mild, general solutions to previously unsolved challenging problems in organic synthesis. The novel catalysts should be as simple as possible in order to develop practical methodologies. Today, almost every chemical compound can, in principal, be somehow prepared by synthetic chemists. However, very few reactions are really efficient from a practical point of view and suffer from a severe lack of generality and especially asymmetric catalysis needs a further breakthrough in order to become a valuable tool for large scale industrial applications. The ultimate goal of our research will be to apply these novel transformations in the target oriented synthesis of natural products and biologically interesting molecules.