Our research program broadly focuses on the development of new catalytic transformations that are efficient, sustainable, and selective. These provide practical synthetic routes towards biologically active molecules that are relevant to the pharmaceutical and agrochemical industries. In general, synthetic organic chemistry is dominated by ionic reactions (two-electron processes) despite the complementary and versatile reactivity of radical intermediates (one-electron processes). This can be rationalised by the lack of methodologies available to control the absolute stereochemistry in radical transformations. To address this challenge, we are developing fundamentally new strategies for conducting catalytic enantioselective radical reactions. Our approach is guided by detailed mechanistic and kinetic studies, which provides valuable insight for directing the optimisation of the catalyst(s) and reaction conditions.

For more information see the CPJ group website: https://craigpj2.wixsite.com/johnstonlab