07/2013

Professor Huw Davies, Director of the Center for Selective C-H Functionalization, USA, has won the EROS Best Reagent Award 2013 for the development of methyl (E)-4-phenyl-2-diazo-3-butenoate. The award was created by Aldrich® Chemistry and John Wiley & Sons to honor the work of the authors of the online edition of Encyclopedia of Reagents for Organic Synthesis (e-EROS). Every year, 200–300 synthetic chemists contribute articles to e-EROS to keep the collection up-to-date and a key source of information for chemists at the bench.

The Editorial Boards select their favorite reagents from among these articles and the resulting shortlist is then voted on by the Award Committee. Professor Davis presented a plenary lecture during the OMCOS (Organometallic Chemistry Directed Towards Organic Synthesis) Symposium at Fort Collins, Colorado, USA, on July 29, 2013, which will soon be available online.

The 2013 Reagent: Methyl (E)-4-phenyl-2-diazo-3-butenoate (CAS: 119987-21-2) Methyl (E)-4-phenyl-2-diazo-3-butenoate is widely used as a carbenoid precursor for cyclopropanations, as a reagent in C–H insertion reactions, in reactions involving ylides, in C–H activation reactions, in tandem C–H activation/Cope rearrangements (CH/Cope), and other related transformations. The article on the award-winning reagent by the Huw Davies Research Group was published in EROS in March 2011.

The recognition of this reagent this year goes hand in hand with the increasing significance of C–H functionalization, demonstrating not only the versatility of this reagent but the increasingly high profile of C–H functionalization as a field of chemistry.