Kilian Muñiz (1970 - 2020) was an ICREA Research Professor at the Institute of Chemical Research of Catalonia (ICIQ) in Tarragona since 2010.  From 1990 to 1996 he studied Chemistry at the Universities of Hannover (Germany), Oviedo (Spain) and Imperial College London (UK), and in 1996 he graduated with a Diploma in Chemistry from Hannover University. From 1996 to 1998 he worked in the group of Prof. Carsten Bolm at the RWTH Aachen (Germany) to obtain his PhD in Organic Chemistry. In 1999/2000 he carried out research as a postdoctoral associate with Prof. Ryoji Noyori at Nagoya University (Japan). He started his independent research in 2001 at Bonn University (Germany) as a Liebig fellow and defended his Habilitation Thesis in 2005. The same year he moved to the University of Strasbourg as an Associate Professor. He was promoted to Full Professor in 2006. In November 2009 he moved to Spain and joined ICIQ as Group Leader.

Research interests

Our research deals with the discovery of novel chemical transformations to provide direct access to nitrogenated molecules, which are key players in a variety of compounds of biological, medicinal and pharmaceutical interest. The group continues devising entirely new oxidative amination reactions based on transformations that do not require any metal promoters. To this end, defined monomeric iodine reagents and catalysts in the oxidation states of +I and +III have been developed. These serve as versatile tools in a variety of novel enantioselective amination reactions. This chemistry is continuously expanded to iodine catalyses and related bromine catalyses for aliphatic C-H amination in order to pioneer effective conceptual tools for advanced oxidation at different stages of chemical synthesis, including building block generation and late-stage diversification. Recently, this amination catalysis has been applied to the synthesis of complex biologically relevant natural products.