In collaboration with Professor Kendall Houk, the Tan group developed a chiral Brønsted acid-catalyzed chlorination strategy for the catalytic asymmetric construction of pyramidal chirality at amide nitrogen centers, overcoming the long-standing challenge of rapid pyramidal inversion at nitrogen stereocenters that thwarted enantioenrichment. The work was published in Nature (2025, 647, 897–905).
Paper link: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09607-6