Join us to hear from Christopher Uyeda, the Herbert C. Brown Professor of Chemistry at Purdue University in this distinguished lectureship series!

Professor Christopher Uyeda is the Herbert C. Brown Professor of Chemistry at Purdue University. After growing up in Vancouver, Canada, he attended Columbia University, where he earned his B.S. in biomedical engineering summa cum laude in 2005. Chris moved to Harvard University to pursue graduate research under the guidance of Prof. Eric Jacobsen. He obtained his Ph.D. in 2011 and then carried out postdoctoral research with Prof. Jonas Peters at Caltech as an NSF Center for Chemical Innovation Fellow. In 2013, Chris started his independent career at Purdue University as an assistant professor. He was promoted to associate professor with tenure in 2019 and to full professor in 2022. 

Research in the Uyeda group encompasses various aspects of molecular catalyst design and is broadly aimed at accomplishing fundamentally challenging bond activations and constructions while providing practical solutions to unsolved problems in organic synthesis. Our approach capitalizes on the unique opportunities in the molecular sciences to rationally manipulate catalyst structure to control function and probe mechanism. We address the latter in a highly interdisciplinary manner, drawing on a diverse array of physical organic and inorganic, spectroscopic, and computational tools to characterize catalytic intermediates and transition states.