Peng Liu is unraveling new reactions — and new ways of working together

Publishing in Nature is a crowning achievement for any researcher, marking the kind of work that can make a career. Peng Liu and his students managed it twice earlier this year — in the same month.

The Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences professor is on a hot streak that shows no sign of stopping, and those two papers — though just a small sample of the many recent high-profile studies his team has published — serve as a guidepost for how he does it. One details a totally new chemical reaction that could find use in new therapeutics, while the other rewrites a textbook reaction that’s taught in every introductory organic chemistry class. 

“The research has been very exciting,” said Liu. “We now have a collection of computational chemistry methods that allows us to tackle problems in completely different types of systems.”

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