Organic Reactions in Aqueous Media with a Focus on Carbon−Carbon Bond Formations:  A Decade Update

Chao-Jun Li was born in 1963 and received his B.Sc. at Zhengzhou University, 1983, his M.S. at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, 1988, and his Ph.D. at McGill University, 1992 (with T. H. Chan and D. N. Harpp). He spent 1992−1994 as a NSERC Postdoctoral Fellow in B. M. Trost's laboratory at Stanford University and became an assistant professor in 1994 at Tulane University. He was promoted to associate professor with tenure in 1998 and full professor in 2000. He was a visiting faculty member (with Robert G. Bergman) at the University of California at Berkeley, 2002. In 2003, he became a Canada Research Chair (Tier I) in Organic/Green Chemistry and a Professor of Chemistry at McGill University in Canada. His current research efforts are to develop innovative and fundamentally new organic reactions that will defy conventional reactivities and possess high “atom efficiency”. Widely known researches include the development of Grignard-type reactions in water, transition-metal catalysis in air and water, alkyne−aldehyde−amine coupling (A³-coupling), asymmetric alkyne−aldehyde−amine coupling (AA³-coupling), and cross-dehydrogenative coupling (CDC) reactions.