Award for the Reagent 8-aminoquinoline

Olafs Daugulis, Professor and Robert A. Welch Chair of Chemistry at the University of Houston, received the 2022 EROS Best Reagent Award for the reagent 8-aminoquinoline.

The award, created to honor authors of articles published in the Encyclopedia of Reagents for Organic Synthesis (EROS), is sponsored by Aldrich® Chemistry and John Wiley & Sons. Updated yearly with new or revised articles from hundreds of synthetic chemists, this encyclopedia of reagents and catalysts remains a primary source of information for chemists at the bench, enabling them to quickly find the most suitable reagent for performing a particular reaction.

Use of the aminoquinoline (AQ) directing group was published in 2005. Since then, AQ moiety has become one of the most widely used auxiliaries for catalytic functionalization of sp2 and sp3 C-H bonds, and it has been employed for directing carbon-carbon double bond functionalization and C-C bond cleavage.

In 2015, EROS first published James Roane’s article on the award-winning reagent. Last year, it was updated by Daugulis and Thanh Le.

Daugulis is the tenth winner of this award, joining a prestigious list of former winners: Paul Knochel in 2011, Bruce Lipshutz in 2012, Huw Davies in 2013, Corey Stephenson in 2014, Phil Baran in 2015, Michael Organ in 2017, Robert Crabtree in 2018, Scott Denmark in 2019, and Franziska Schönebeck in 2020.

He is interested in chemistry of carbon-hydrogen bond functionalization, development of new catalysts for olefin polymerization, and application of organometallic chemistry to organic chemistry problems.