Rate My Professor Tehshik P. Yoon

Tehshik P. Yoon is a Professor of Chemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he serves as Associate Chair for the Graduate Program and Director of Graduate Studies. He earned an A.B. in Chemistry summa cum laude from Harvard University in 1996 under David A. Evans, studying stereocontrolled aldol reactions. Yoon obtained an M.S. from the California Institute of Technology in 1998 with Erick M. Carreira, exploring photochemistry in natural product synthesis. He completed his Ph.D. in Chemistry at Caltech in 2002 under David W. C. MacMillan, beginning graduate work at UC Berkeley, with a thesis on the acyl-Claisen rearrangement and its enantioselective variants. From 2002 to 2005, he was an NIH postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University with Eric N. Jacobsen, investigating hydrogen bonding catalysts for asymmetric synthesis.

Joining the UW-Madison faculty as Assistant Professor in 2005, he advanced to Associate Professor in 2011 and Professor in 2013. Yoon's research centers on catalytic organic synthesis, emphasizing visible light photocatalysis to harness reactive intermediates such as heteroatom-centered radicals, alkene radical cations, and electronically excited organic triplets for constructing complex molecules. His innovations in dual catalysis and stereocontrolled photochemistry have transformed synthetic strategies. Seminal publications include 'Visible light photocatalysis as a greener approach to photochemical synthesis' (Nature Chemistry, 2010), 'Dual catalysis strategies in photochemical synthesis' (Chemical Reviews, 2016), and 'Solar synthesis: prospects in visible light photocatalysis' (Science, 2014), which have received thousands of citations and shaped modern photoredox catalysis. Yoon has earned major awards, including the 2026 Samsung Ho-Am Prize in Chemistry for pioneering transition metal photocatalysis, the 2026 David A. Evans Award for the Advancement and Education of Organic Synthesis from the American Chemical Society, Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award (2015), Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award (2010), Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship (2009), Beckman Young Investigator Award (2008), and NSF CAREER Award (2007). He is an AAAS Fellow (2014) and Associate Editor for ACS Catalysis.