(Correspondent, Weilu Zhang) Professor Tobias Ritter from the Max Planck Institute of Coal
Research in Germany visited Professor Xiao Shen’s group on Oct 21-22th. Professor Shen in-
troduced our research aim and latest progress from our group. Professor speaks highly of our
research.
On October 22th, 2018, Professor Ritter gave us the 75th Lecture of Yangtze Academic For-
um. He presented a talk entitled "The Need of Late-Stage Functionalization" and summarized
his research on Late-Stage Functionalization of complex natural and non-natural products.
The lecture introduces a series of metal catalyzed functionalization reactions, which provides
potential ways for the synthesis of PET tracers with significant applications. In addition, he in-
troduced a series of reagents invented by his team, such as Phenofluor, Alkylfluor, which have
been widely used in synthetic organic chemistry. Among them, the PhenoFluor reagent which
can be applied to selective deoxyfluorination of phenols and alcohols were discussed in details.
After the lecture, Zhaoliang Yang, Weilu Zhang, Xingxing Gong, Xiang Chen, Shaowei Chen
and Chunyu Lv joined the lunch with Professor Tobias Ritter. They had an in-depth discussion
on the problems of post-graduate study and how to do scientific research, which stimulated
the enthusiasm of the teachers and students in the research group.
Introduction of the reporter
Professor Tobias Ritter was born in Germany, in 1975 and graduated from Brunswick Poly-
technic University in 1999. He studied in the laboratory of Professor Barry M. Trost of Stanford
University in the United States. In 2004, he graduated from the Federal Institute of Technolo-
gy (ETH ZU rich) in Zurich, Switzerland, under the guidance of Professor Erick M. Carreira. Then
he did the postdoctoral work under the guidance of Professor Robert H. Grubbs. In 2006,
Ritter joined the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard University as an
assistant professor. He was promoted to associate professor in 2010 and to Professor in 2012.
In 2015,Ritter joined the Max Planck Institute of Coal Research in Germany as a director of the
organic synthesis laboratory and the director of the Max Planck Institute of Coal Research sta-
rting from 2018.
