Research

The major research efforts of our synthetically oriented group are directed towards the development of new catalytic asymmetric methodolgies, which are currently not feasible or not generally applicable.

The novel catalytic systems should be readily accessible and the procedures as simple as possible to develop practical methods, which ideally have the potential for large scale applications. Today, almost every chemical compound can, in principal, be somehow prepared by synthetic chemists. However, very few reactions are efficient enough from a practical point of view and suffer from a severe lack of generality. In this context especially asymmetric catalysis needs a further breakthrough to become a valuable tool for technical applications.

Next to the development of highly efficient catalyst systems an additional focus of our work is the discovery of new synthetically versatile reactive intermediates for asymmetric catalysis to prepare high-added-value building blocks with a large increase of molecular complexity. This permits a rapid access to complex structures, which are usually only available by multistep procedures.