On the afternoon of August 28, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) held a press conference in Beijing to announce the 2020 Tan Kah Kee Science Award and Tan Kah Kee Youth Science Award winners.
SCU’s Xiaoming Feng won the chemical science award of this year's Tan Kah Kee Science Award. The title of the award-winning project is "New Dominant Dinitrogen Ligands and Efficient Asymmetric Catalysis". Professor Xiaoming Feng is an academician of CAS and a fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry. His research is mainly focused on asymmetric catalytic synthesis. He has made important achievements in the design and synthesis of new chiral ligands and catalysts, asymmetric catalytic reactions, efficient and highly selective synthesis of chiral drugs and physiologically active compounds. Moreover, he has developed a class of chiral dinitroxamides with flexible conformation, known as "Feng's Ligands”, which are recognized as new dominant chiral ligands and catalysts. What’s more, he has achieved more than 50 kinds of important asymmetric catalytic reactions with high efficiency and high selectivity, with ten of them being challenging new asymmetric catalytic reactions. One of them has been named the Roskamp-Feng reaction in the 3rd edition of Organic Syntheses Based on Name Reactions by Elsevier. This finding also corrects the conclusion in the organic chemistry textbook of the United States that "it is impossible to prepare optically active β - keto esters with chiral centers located between two carbonyls". His asymmetric catalytic reactions provide simple and efficient synthetic methods for more than 20 important chiral drugs, natural products and synthetic intermediates, and he has greatly enhanced China's international status in the field of asymmetric synthesis.
Professor Xiaoming Feng has published more than 400 SCI papers, obtained one U.S. patent and six Chinese patents. In addition, he is a member of the Academic Degrees Committee of the State Council, executive director of the Chinese Chemical Society(CCS), chairman of the chirality committee of CCS. He also serves as an editor or advisory board member for many academic journals at home and abroad.The awards he has received include a second prize of the National Natural Science Award,two first prizes of the Natural Science Award of the Ministry of Education, the material science award of the third Future Science Award, Science and Technology Progress Award of Ho Leung Ho Lee Foundation,theNational Innovation Medal, the chiral chemistry award of CCS, Organic Synthesis Creation Award andthe Huang Yao-Zeng Organometallic Chemistry Award.
