On the afternoon of May 21, 2026, at the invitation of the School of Chemistry and Materials Science, Nanjing Normal University, Professor P. Andrew Evans from Queen’s University, Department of Chemistry, delivered an academic lecture entitled Allylic Cross-Coupling Reactions for the Construction of Acyclic Tertiary and Quaternary Stereocenters at the Maoyi Lecture Series, held offline in Room 226, Huaxing Building. Faculty members and graduate students from the School of Chemistry and Materials Science attended the lecture.
Professor P. Andrew Evans is the Alfred R. Bader Chair of Organic Chemistry and a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Organic and Organometallic Chemistry in the Department of Chemistry at Queen’s University. He is also a Changjiang Scholar at Central South University in China. He received a B.Sc. with honours in Applied Chemistry at Newcastle Polytechnic in 1987 and completed his Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge in 1991 under the supervision of Andrew B. Holmes, FRS. He then pursued postdoctoral research with Philip D. Magnus, FRS, at the University of Texas at Austin as a NATO Postdoctoral Fellow. In 1993, he began his independent career at the University of Delaware, where he was promoted to Professor before moving to Indiana University in 2001. In 2006, he became the Heath Harrison Chair of Organic Chemistry at the University of Liverpool before assuming his current role in 2012. His recent awards include the R. U. Lemieux Award, the Paul G. Gassman Distinguished Service Award, the Harry and Carol Mosher Award, the Changjiang Scholar Award, the ACS Cope Scholar Award, and the RSC Pedler Award. He has been actively involved in the ACS Division of Organic Chemistry, serving as a Member-at-Large, Councilor, National Organic Symposium Executive Officer and Division Chair. He currently co-chairs the ACS-DOC Graduate Research Symposium, which he conceived and initiated in 2010 with Gary Molander. Professor Evans has held editorial roles as an Associate Editor for Chemical Communications and Synthesis. He is also the former Editor-in-Chief and current President of Organic Reactions. He has published over 150 papers, articles, reviews, book chapters and monographs, and delivered over 600 plenary and invited lectures.
The polarity reversal of classical functional groups offers a powerful yet underexplored strategy in synthesis, enabling disconnections that bypass the constraints of traditional two-electron pathways. A striking example lies in heteroatom-stabilized allylic anions, which act as ambident nucleophiles and can serve as acyl anions or homoenolate equivalents. Despite their conceptual appeal, practical application has been hindered by longstanding issues with regioselectivity and the near-total absence of stereocontrol. This presentation will highlight our recent development of enantioselective reactions that construct allylic and homoallylic acyclic tertiary and quaternary stereogenic centers in complex bioactive molecules. Our approach merges a highly conserved enantioselective transformation with a stereospecific rearrangement, enabling the precise relay of stereochemistry to a remote site. These advances unlock streamlined access to elusive acyclic remote stereocenters, revealing new frontiers for polarity-reversed nucleophiles in asymmetric synthesis.