Rate My Professor Yuxuan Ye

Dr. Yuxuan Ye is an assistant professor at Westlake University in the School of Science, appointed since September 2022. Born in 1991 in Nanjing, Jiangsu province, China, he earned his B.S. in Chemistry from Peking University between 2009 and 2013. During his undergraduate studies, he conducted research on copper-catalyzed trifluoromethylation reactions under the supervision of Prof. Jianbo Wang and Prof. Yan Zhang, and performed summer research at the University of California, Los Angeles with Prof. Neil Garg. Ye received his Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2018, where he worked with Prof. Stephen L. Buchwald on Pd-catalyzed fluorination and CuH-catalyzed asymmetric alkylation reactions. He completed a brief postdoctoral stint at MIT with Buchwald from June to December 2018, followed by postdoctoral research with Prof. Todd K. Hyster at Princeton University and Cornell University from January 2019 to July 2022, focusing on photoenzymatic catalysis.

Ye's research interests focus on the development of novel biocatalytic methods for organic synthesis and other applications. His laboratory integrates chemistry, chemical biology, and protein engineering to advance chemical synthesis and synthetic biology. Key recent publications include 'Unmasking the Reverse Catalytic Activity of ‘Ene’-Reductases for Asymmetric Carbonyl Desaturation' in Nature Chemistry (2025, 17, 74-82), a 16-step scalable chemoenzymatic synthesis of tetrodotoxin in the Journal of the American Chemical Society (2026), and 'Sequence Similarity Network Guided Discovery of a Flavin-Dependent Reductase to Isomerase for Enantiodivergent Synthesis' in Angewandte Chemie International Edition (2025). Additional works feature contributions to selective terpene oxidation and carbonyl desaturation using ene-reductases, demonstrating innovative approaches to biocatalytic site- and stereoselective transformations. These efforts underscore his influence in expanding enzymatic capabilities for complex molecule synthesis.