Postdoc. Los Alamos National Lab and University of Basel (2013)
Ph.D. Institute of Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Science (2006)
B.S. Wuhan University (2001)
Dr. Zhang earned his doctorate in Organic Chemistry from the Institute of Chemistry of Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2006. He then moved to the University of Basel in Switzerland and later to the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in the US to conduct postdoctoral research under the supervision of Professors Wolf-D Woggon, Catherine Housecroft and Edwin Constable, and Dr. Susan Hanson. He was a recipient of Novartis Foundation - Formerly the Ciba-Geigy Jubilee Foundation and LANL Director’s Postdoctoral Fellowships. Since 2013, he has been an Assistant Professor at John Jay College of the City University of New York (CUNY). He also holds a joint professorship at the CUNY Graduate Center. His research interests lie in organometallic chemistry, metal catalysis, supramolecular chemistry and forensic science.
Selected Publications (Undergraduate coauthors are underlined):
Guoqi Zhang,* Haisu Zeng, Shengping Zheng, Michelle C. Neary, Pavel A. Dub,* “Vanadium-Catalyzed Stereo- and Regioselective Hydroboration of Alkynes to Vinyl Boronate”, ACS Catal. 2022, 12, 5425-5429.
Guoqi Zhang,* Jing Wu, Shengping Zheng, Michelle C. Neary, Jincheng Mao,* Marco Flores, Ryan Trovitch, Pavel A. Dub,* “Redox Non-Innocent Ligand Supported Vanadium Catalysts for Chemoselective Reduction of C=X (X = O, N) Functionalities”, J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2019, 141, 15230-15239.
Guoqi Zhang,* Jessica Cheng, Kezia Davis, Mary Grace Bonifacio and Cynthia Zajaczkowski, “Practical and Selective Hydroboration of Aldehydes and Ketones in Air Catalysed by an Iron(II) Coordination Polymer”, Green Chem. 2019, 21, 1114-1121.
Haisu Zeng, Jing Wu, Sihan Li, Christina Hui, Anita Ta, Shu-Yuan Cheng,* Shengping Zheng,* Guoqi Zhang,* “Copper(II)-Catalyzed Selective Hydroboration of Ketones and Aldehydes”, Org. Lett. 2019, 21, 401-406.
Guoqi Zhang,* Jing Wu, Haisu Zeng, Michelle C. Neary, Matthew Devany, Shengping Zheng, Pavel A. Dub,* “Dearomatization and Functionalization of Terpyridine Ligands Leading to Unprecedented Zwitterionic Meisenheimer Aluminum Complexes and Their Use in Catalytic Hydroboration”, ACS Catal. 2019, 9, 874-884.
Guoqi Zhang,* Jing Wu, Sihan Li, Sean Cass, Shengping Zheng, “Markovnikov-Selective Hydroboration of Vinylarenes by a Cobalt(II) Coordination Polymer ”, Org. Lett. 2018, 20, 7893-7897.
Jing Wu, Haisu Zeng, Jessica Cheng, Shengping Zheng,* James A. Golen, David R. Manke, Guoqi Zhang,* “Cobalt(II) Coordination Polymer as a Precatalyst for Selective Hydroboration of Aldehydes, Ketones, and Imines”, J. Org. Chem. 2018, 83, 9442-9448.
Guoqi Zhang,* Jing Wu, Haisu Zeng, Shu Zhang, Zhiwei Yin, Shengping Zheng, “Cobalt-Catalyzed α-Alkylation of Ketones with Primary Alcohols”, Org. Lett. 2017, 19, 1080-1083.
Guoqi Zhang,* Haisu Zeng, Jing Wu, Zhiwei Yin, Shengping,* James C. Fettinger, “Highly Selective Hydroboration of Alkenes, Ketones and Aldehydes Catalyzed by a Well-Defined Manganese Complex”, Angew. Chem. Int. Ed., 2016, 55, 14369-14372.
Zhiwei Yin, Haisu Zeng, Jing Wu, Shengping Zheng*, Guoqi Zhang,* “Cobalt-Catalyzed Synthesis of Aromatic, Aliphatic, and Cyclic Secondary Amines via a ‘Hydrogen-Borrowing’ Strategy", ACS Catal. 2016, 6, 6546-6550.
Guoqi Zhang,* Zhiwei Yin, Shengping Zheng, "Cobalt-catalyzed N-alkylation of amines with alcohols”, Org. Lett. 2016, 18, 300-303.
Li, Q.; Xu, P.;* Gao, W.; Ma, S.; Zhang, G.;* Cao, R.; Cho, J.; Wang, H.; Wu, G.,* “Carbon-nanotubes/graphene nanocomposite derived from cage-containing metal-organic framework for oxygen reduction in nonaqueous Li-O2 battery cathodes”, Adv. Mater. 2014, 26, 1378-1386.
Zhang, G.; Vasudevan, K. V.; Scott, B. L.; Hanson, S. K., “Understanding the mechanisms of cobalt-catalyzed hydrogenation and dehydrogenation reactions”, J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2013, 135, 8668-8681.
Zhang, G.; Scott, B. L.; Hanson, S. K., “Mild and homogeneous cobalt-catalyzed hydrogenation of C=C, C=O, and C=N bonds”, Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2012, 51, 12102-12106. ("VIP" paper and Front Cover)
We are interested in the area of synthetic chemistry of novel organic and organometallic compounds and their applications in catalysis (homogeneous, heterogeneous and asymmetric), drug development, supramolecular chemistry, and forensic science. Current research in our laboratory concerns three aspects:
1) Development of highly efficient catalyst systems based on earth-abundant metals towards green and atom-economic catalysis.
2) Design, synthesis and cytotoxicity evaluation of novel metal-based anticancer agents using abundant and less toxic copper and cobalt.
3) Metallic supramolecular chemistry and its applications in molecular recognition/sensing and forensic science.
Students in our group will receive broad training in the areas of organic and organometallic synthesis, chemical catalysis and fluorescence analysis. They will gain hands-on working experience in modern synthetic techniques including Schlenk line and glovebox operations, single-crystal growth techniques and a variety of analytical techniques, including NMR spectroscopy, gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS), high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), FT-IR, UV-Vis and fluorescence spectroscopies.