On July 17, the winners of the 5^th Xplorer Prize were announced.

Xin-Yuan LIU, Chair Professor of the Department of Chemistry at the Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech), received the Xplorer Prize in recognition of his contributions to the field of new materials chemistry.

Xin-Yuan LIU is a recipient of the National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars and the National Natural Science Fund for Outstanding Youth, and was selected as a Distinguished Professor (Youth) by the Ministry of Education.

Since joining the Department of Chemistry at SUSTech in September 2012, he has published over 100 papers as a corresponding author and applied for 15 patents.

Prof. LIU’s research team has long been engaged in the in-depth research of asymmetric radical chemistry. They proposed a unique new strategy by developing a series of chiral anion/Cu catalysts as a novel single-electron transfer catalyst to realize different types of radical-involved asymmetric reactions, solved the problem of chiral control of highly active radicals, and expanded their application demonstration research in the utilization of resource molecules and the synthesis of chiral drugs.

In December 2022, the research team made important progress in the field of asymmetric radical sulfur-oxygen coupling reactions, with their results being published in Nature Chemistry; in March 2023, they made a breakthrough in the enantioconvergent N-alkylation of aliphatic amines, and their findings were published in Nature.

The Xplorer Prize is a scientist-led award funded by the New Cornerstone Science Foundation, encouraging young scientists to engage in research in key science and technology fields. The prize is awarded to 50 scientists each year in ten areas of basic science and frontier technologies.

This is the third time scholars from SUSTech have received the Xplorer Prize. In the first list of winners in 2019, Xingyu JIANG, Chair Professor of the Department of Biomedical Engineering, and Weishu LIU, Professor of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, received the Xplorer Prize, and in 2020, Liyuan ZHANG, Professor of the Department of Physics, also received the prize.

Related link: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/7uvb1nGpUA4E-Me5-yIczQ