Yumeng Xi

Education

Undergraduate Institution: Peking University

Graduate Institution: University of California, Berkeley

Biography

Yumeng received his B.S. degree in chemistry from Peking University where he worked on the total synthesis of a series of macrolactam natural products in the laboratory of Professor Zhen Yang. After two years’ stay in Professor Xiaodong Shi’s group at West Virginia University working in the area of gold catalysis and obtaining his M.S. degree, he moved to Berkeley to join the group of Professor John F. Hartwig. In the Hartwig group, Yumeng focused on the development of transition-metal catalysts for selective hydrofunctionalization of unactivated internal alkenes, including an iridium catalytic system that is the most active toward alkene hydroamination to date, and the mechanistic understanding of those systems. During his PhD, he was a Bristol-Myers Squibb graduate fellow (2018-2019), a recipient of Genentech Graduate Symposium in Chemical Research (2018), and named a finalist for Reaxys PhD Prize (2019). He joined the Hawker group in January 2020 as a postdoctoral researcher.

Research

Yumeng's research focuses on developing novel photo-flow polymerization techniques.