New Associate Editor - The Americas

Chao-Jun Li was born in 1963 and received his BSc at Zhengzhou University (1983), his MS at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing (1998) and his PhD (with honor) at McGill University (1992) under the direction of T. H. Chan and D. N. Harpp. While at McGill he was awarded a Max Bell Graduate Open Fellowship and a Clifford Wong Graduate Fellowship. He spent 1992–94 as an NSERC Postdoctoral Fellow in Barry M. Trost's laboratory at Stanford University (US), and following that went to Tulane University (US) as an assistant professor. He was promoted to associate professor with tenure in 1998 and full professor in 2000. In 2003, he became a Canada Research Chair (Tier I) in Green Chemistry and a Professor of Chemistry at McGill University in Canada.

While at Tulane University, Li received an NSF Career Award (1997), an Outstanding Young Scientist Award (Overseas) from NSF of China (2000), a Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Award from the US EPA (2001), a Faculty Research Award from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Tulane (2002), and an Annual Award from the Business Association of New Orleans (2002). He was an Eli Lilly Teaching Fellow in 1995 and a Japan Society for Promotion of Science (Senior) Fellow in 2002. He is an honorary research professor at the Chemistry Institute of the Chinese Academy of Science (1996–) and a guest professor at the University of Science and Technology in China (2001). He was a visiting professor (with Robert G. Bergman) at University of California at Berkeley (2002).

Li has served as an International Co-coordinator of Green Chemistry Conferences in China (2000–). He was a consulting editor of The Encyclopedia of Sciences and Technologies (2002) and The Year Book of Sciences and Technologies (2002) and was on the Editorial Advisory Boards of Letters in Organic Chemistry and Mini Reviews in Organic Chemistry.

His current research efforts are to develop a Green Chemistry for organic synthesis based upon innovative and fundamentally new organic reactions that will defy conventional reactivities and possess high “atom-efficiency”. He has published over 160 original research papers and reviews and co-authored with T. H. Chan a book, Organic Reactions in Aqueous Media (John Wiley, 1997).

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