The School of Science and Engineering (SSE) is committed to creating a platform for students and faculty members to exchange ideas and explore cutting-edge research developments in various fields of science and engineering. Starting from 2021 fall, SSE will organize the "Weekly Colloquium" series of seminars every Friday. Each week, SSE will invite our faculty members and distinguished guest speakers from outside the University to conduct academic seminars.  

All students and faculty members are invited to join the weekly colloquium!

About the Colloquium

The speaker on September 6 is Prof. Jun ZHU of SSE. The following is detailed information about the colloquium.

Topic: Aromaticity: The Past, Present and Future

Time: 10:30-11:30 AM, September 6 (Friday)

Venue: Room 102, Teaching D

Speaker: Prof. Jun ZHU

Host: Prof. Xiaoshui PENG

Abstract

Aromaticity, one of the most fundamental and controversial concepts in chemistry, has attracted considerable attention from both theoreticians and experimentalists. However, besides the parent aromatics—benzene, transition metal-involved aromatics are less developed. In this talk, I will demonstrate an important rule of transition metals in several metallaaromatics by density functional theory calculations. Specifically, Craig aromaticity, σ-aromaticity, hyperconjugative aromaticity and adaptive aromaticity will be discussed. All these findings show a magic power of transition metals originating from participation of more electrons from d orbitals in aromaticity rather than one electron for the carbon atom, opening an avenue to the design of novel metallaaromatics. Finally, the application of aromaticity to dinitrogen activation and singlet fission will be also discussed.

The Speaker

Dr. Jun ZHU obtained the bachelor’s degree from Department of Chemistry, Xiamen University in 2000 and the doctor of philosophy from Department of Chemistry, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in 2007. Then he pursued postdoctoral studies at Dan Yang’s group (The University of Hong Kong) and Henrik Ottosson’s group (Uppsala University), respectively. He joined Xiamen University in 2010 to start the independent career and was promoted to a full professor in 2018. In 2023, he moved to the School of Science and Engineering at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen. He has been funded by seven projects of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) and earned an extensive experience in computational organometallic chemistry including analyses of novel structures, bonding (aromaticity) and reaction mechanisms including dinitrogen activation by theoretical calculation. He proposed the concept of adaptive aromaticity beyond the classical Hückel and Baird’s rule, moving the aromatic chemistry forward from one-state aromaticity to two-state aromaticity and developed the application of this concept to singlet fission materials. He has published 219 SCI-indexed papers including those published in high impact journals such as Accounts of Chemical Research, Nature Chemistry, Nature Communications, Journal of the American Chemical Society and Angewandte Chemie International Edition etc. He received various awards including the New Century Excellent Talents in University (2013), the Top-Notch Young Talent of China (2014), the Leading Talent in the Fujian Province (2015), the First Prize of the Natural Science in Fujian Province (the third authorship, 2019), the Second Prize of the National Natural Science (the third authorship, 2020) and the Leading Talent of China (2023).