Rate My Professor Peiyuan Yu

Peiyuan Yu is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry at Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech). He received his B.Sc. from Nanyang Technological University in 2012 and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 2017 under the guidance of Professor Kendall N. Houk. His graduate research focused on computational studies of the reactivity, selectivity, and molecular dynamics of cycloaddition reactions. From 2017 to 2019, he served as a postdoctoral fellow at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, conducting theoretical, computational, and experimental research in thermochemical energy storage. He joined the faculty at SUSTech in September 2019.

Yu’s research centers on computational organic chemistry. Key publications include “Asymmetric Phosphoric Acid–Catalyzed Four-Component Ugi Reaction” (Science, 2018), “Organocatalytic [6+4] Cycloadditions via Zwitterionic Intermediates: Chemo-, Regio-, and Stereoselectivities” (Journal of the American Chemical Society, 2018), “Mechanisms and Origins of Periselectivity of the Ambimodal [6+4] Cycloadditions of Tropone to Dimethylfulvene” (Journal of the American Chemical Society, 2017), “Distortion-Controlled Reactivity and Molecular Dynamics of Dehydro-Diels–Alder Reactions” (Journal of the American Chemical Society, 2016), and “Transannular [6+4] and Ambimodal Cycloaddition in the Biosynthesis of Heronamide A” (Journal of the American Chemical Society, 2015). His work has contributed to understanding reaction mechanisms in organic chemistry.