On May 28, 2025, Academician Dawei Ma from Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences was invited to Nankai Lectureship on Organic Chemistry by State Key Laboratory of Elemento-organic Chemistry, and gave a wonderful lecture titled "Developing Efficient Methods to Enhance Synthetic Value" in Shixian Building. Academician Jun Chen, vice president of Nankai University, attended the event. The lecture was hosted by the personnel of the Key Laboratory, and over 200 teachers and students from the Key Laboratory and the College of Chemistry participated in the lecture.
Before the lecture, Jun Chen presented Dawei Ma with a certificate of "Nankai Lectureship on Organic Chemistry". In the lecture session, Academician Ma focused on the efficient synthesis of drug molecules, introducing the novel bidentate ligand-promoted Ullmann-Ma coupling reaction and efficient synthesis strategies for natural products with significant biological activity developed by his research group in recent years, which demonstrated the critical role of organic synthesis chemistry in the development of pesticides and pharmaceuticals. After the lecture, teachers and students engaged in interaction with Academician Ma actively.
Academician Dawei Ma graduated from the Department of Chemistry at Shandong University in 1984 and obtained his PhD from the Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1989. From 1990 to 1994, he conducted postdoctoral research at the Department of Chemistry at the University of Pittsburgh and the Department of Neurochemistry and Neurobiology at the Mayo Clinic. In 1994, he returned to work at the Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and was elected as an Academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2019. He is currently a researcher at the Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences and his research focused on organic synthesis methodology, total synthesis of natural products, and drug discovery. His recent awards include the ACS Cope Scholar Award (2018), the Future Science Prize in Material Science (2018), and Outstanding Scientific Achievement Award of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (2019).
