Zachary K. Wickens

Zach Wickens is currently an Associate Professor of Chemistry at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Zach received his B.A. from Macalester College (2010) and his Ph.D (2015) from the California Institute of Technology with Robert H. Grubbs. In his doctoral work, he discovered and studied new catalyst-controlled Wacker oxidation reactions. Following doctoral studies, Zach was an NIH postdoctoral scholar in the lab of Eric N. Jacobsen at Harvard University. In his postdoctoral studies, he developed a useful synthetic methodology to prepare chiral building blocks and introduced a potentially general framework to precisely control reactive ionic intermediates. In 2018, Zach launched his independent career at UW–Madison where his group develops new approaches to generate and exploit reactive intermediates in organic synthesis using light and electricity. His research has led to a range of important discoveries, including advancing strategies to exploit abundant nucleophiles in oxidative alkene functionalization, introducing powerful photocatalytic systems for challenging reductions, and pioneering the use of formate salts as sources of CO2•–.