Rate My Professor Tianfei Liu

Tianfei Liu is a tenure-track Professor in the State Key Laboratory of Elemento-Organic Chemistry at the College of Chemistry, Nankai University. He earned his B.S. in Medicinal Chemistry from China Pharmaceutical University in 2008 and his Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry from the Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, in 2014 under the supervision of Prof. Qilong Shen. His postdoctoral research included positions at Uppsala University in Sweden from 2015 to 2018, collaborating with Prof. Leif Hammarström and Prof. Sascha Ott, and at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 2018 to 2020 under Prof. Alex Miller.

Liu’s research focuses on the mechanism study of key bond transformations in organometallic and elemento-organic systems using physical organic chemistry methods to explore new photo- and electro-catalytic reaction systems. Specific interests include proton-coupled electron transfer and other electron-coupled group transfer processes, physical organic chemistry in new elemento-organic solvent environments, artificial modeling systems for metalloenzymes, and the discovery of new catalytic systems with applications in biomass and CO₂ transformations. He has received honors including the National Scholarship for graduate students, the Outstanding Graduate of Shanghai award, and several presentation and travel awards. Selected publications include work on accelerating proton-coupled electron transfer of metal hydrides in Nature Chemistry (2018) and elucidating proton-coupled electron transfer mechanisms in the Journal of the American Chemical Society (2019). Liu has delivered invited lectures at international conferences such as the Pacifichem 2021 Congress and serves as a grant reviewer for the National Science Center in Poland.