Our Team
of enthusiastic chemists
Dennis Chung-Yang Huang
Principal Investigator
Dennis was born in Kaohsiung, Taiwan in 1988. After high school, he moved to the United States and obtained his B.S. degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2010, where he conducted his undergraduate research with Prof. Rick Danheiser on total synthesis and during which he was an MIT-Japan MISTI Program Fellow at The University of Tokyo in 2009. He then joined the laboratory of Prof. Abigail Doyle at Princeton University for his PhD study, where in his thesis work he developed a class of electron-deficient olefin ligands for nickel catalyzed cross-coupling reactions. Upon completion of his PhD in 2015, he moved to Germany to work with Prof. Stefan Hecht as a Humboldt Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, where he developed a series of photoswitches based on indigo compounds. Afterwards, he returned home briefly for military service and a year of industrial work at ScinoPharm Taiwan. In 2021, Dennis began his independent career at the Institute for Chemical Reaction Design and Discovery (ICReDD) of Hokkaido University in Sapporo, Japan.
CV (link) (updated September 2023)
Contact
Dennis Chung-Yang Huang
Email: dcyhuang AT icredd.hokudai.ac.jp
Amit Kumar Jaiswal
ICReDD postdoctoral researcher
Amit was born in New Delhi, India and raised in Kolkata (formerly Calcutta) where he completed his B.Sc. (Hons) in Chemistry at St Pauls` Cathedral Mission College under Calcuuta University in 2013. Later, he finished his M.Sc. in Chemistry in 2015 at Pondicherry University, where he worked under Prof. N Dastagiri Reddy on the development of main group Lewis acid complexes for the ring opening polymerization of cyclic esters and amide. In 2016, he started his PhD journey at National University of Singapore with Prof. Rowan Drury Young, where Amit was awarded NUS research Scholarship . His thesis work focused on the development of Lewis acid catalysis for the activation and functionalization of carbon-fluorine bonds. Outside of lab, Amit enjoys travelling and exploring different countries to learn about culture, history, art, cuisine and music. Besides enjoying reading, he is also a big fan of football.
Priya Saha
PhD student
Priya has her roots in India: born in Assam, brought up in Kolkata, and has completed her bachelor and master degrees from Banaras Hindu University in Varanasi, India. After obtaining her master degree, she joined Integrated Product Development Organization, Dr. Reddys Laboratory in Hyderabad, India as an Active Pharmaceutical Ingredient Research and Development scientist, where she worked on the projects of Empagliflozin, Apalutamide, and Obeticholic acid. She then worked under the supervision of Prof. Maya Shankar Singh on the construction of carbocycles or heterocycles by employing α-enolic dithioesters, β-ketothioamides as well as their sister analogues. Currently she is a doctoral student at ICReDD, Hokkaido University, working in the field of photochemistry. During her leisure time, she enjoys painting and listening to music.
Kai Sun
Joint PhD student from Sawamura group
SUN graduated from Nankai University, China with a bachelor’s degree in 2017. In 2019, he moved to Japan to carry out graduate studies in Sawamura lab at Hokkaido University and obtained his master's degree in 2021. Since then, he joined ICReDD to pursue a joint PhD study between the Sawamura group and the Huang lab. His work focuses on the direct functionalization of carboxylic acid using boron catalyst. Presently, he is investigating the methodology of developing his chemistry with the aid of data science tools. He enjoys broad while trivial knowledge.
Alumni
Anna Nožičková
Visiting student (2023 summer)
Anna started her chemistry journey during bachelor thesis in calixarene chemistry in Prof. Lhoták laboratory, University of Chemistry and Technology Prague. She then joined Dr. Kovaříček group also at UCT Prague. At present, she is working on photoswitches with catalytic function based on acyl hydrazones. She visited the lab for three months as an intern student, working on multi-centered photoswitches by combining the indigo chemistry with acyl hydrazones.