Liela (Bayeh) Romero

And just like that, today marks 5 years for the group! Very grateful to 1) the creative, hardworking researchers I’ve worked with and 2) colleagues near are far who supported our efforts and my early bid for tenure.

Excited to start the next chapter this August: Associate Professor with tenure

PhD #2 for the Romero group marks the end of an era for the first cohort of students– congrats to Dr. Lubaev on completing the PhD!

Zirconium-Catalyzed Reductive Sulfonamidation of Amides and Its Application to Site-Selective N-Alkylation of Pharmaceuticals The direct catalytic reductive amination of amides remains a challenging transformation, particularly when using weakly nucleophilic amines. However, this strategy offers several synthetic advantages, particularly due to the wide availability of amides, as well as N-sulfonyl and N-sulfinyl amines. We present a mild catalytic approach for the monoalkylation of sulfonamides, sulfamates, sulfamides, and sulfinamides using amides. This protocol exploits the oxophilic character of zirconium, an early, earth-abundant metal, to drive dual reductive cycles and enable the critical amination step. This chemistry is carried out at room temperature using just 10 mol % of Cp2ZrCl2 in combination with hydrosilane reductant, yielding products in up to 94% isolated yield with excellent selectivity. This chemistry enables site-selective monoalkylation of sulfonamides, including examples of late-stage N-alkylation in pharmaceutical applications.

Direct reductive amination of amides with sulfonamides at RT?

✅ Zr-catalysis makes it possible—mild, efficient, and selective for late-stage monoalkylation.

Check out the latest paper from our group now available online @ ACS Catalysis! #chemsky
pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10....

Continuing the recent good news for the group: NSF CAREER was awarded this week!

Super stoked to continue our explorations and take this research to the next level. More exciting Zr chemistry to come!

#chemsky

Next up this week:

What a pleasant surprise to see our Zr-catalyzed conversion of esters to amines selected for the 2024 #ChemSciMostPopular catalysis articles!

I spy a second Zr-catalysis paper in the collection– love to see it!

#Chemsky

Lewis Base-Catalyzed Interhalogenation of Terminal Allenes: Selective Strategy for Accessing Vicinal Vinylic, Allylic Heterodihalides Though precedent remains limited, the selective interhalogenation of allenes offers a valuable synthetic strategy to access products where each halide exhibits orthogonal reactivity. Here, we describe...

Starting off my posts on Bluesky with a string of good news for the group:

First up this week, our study on the catalytic dihalogenation of allenes is now online– kudos to the team for all their hard work!

pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1...