Vy Dong

Vy Maria Dong (born 1976) is a Professor of Chemistry at the University of California, Irvine. She works on enantioselective catalysis and natural product synthesis. She won the American Chemical Society's 2019 Elias James Corey Award.

Dong was born in Big Spring, Texas. She was the daughter of a machinist and manicurist and the first of her family to graduate from college. She grew up in Anaheim, California. She studied chemistry at University of California, Irvine as a Regents' scholar. She decided to become a scientist during her sophomore year after taking a class with Larry E. Overman. She completed a research project with Larry E. Overman, and graduated Magna cum Laude in 1998. She met her future husband, Wilmer Alkhas, at the University of California, Irvine. She moved to University of California, Berkeley as a graduate student. She worked with David MacMillan and earned her master's degree in 2000. She joined California Institute of Technology for her PhD, working on the Zwitterionic Claisen Rearrangement and the total synthesis of Erythronolide B. Dong was appointed a National Institutes of Health postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley College of Chemistry, working on supramolecular chemistry with Robert G. Bergman and Ken Raymond.

Dong moved to Canada to work at the University of Toronto. She was awarded an Ontario Research Fund grant in 2008. She delivered the inaugural Eli Lilly Young lecture at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 2009, where she discussed the catalytic transformations of C-H bonds. At Toronto, she worked on heterocycles for medicinal chemistry. She demonstrated how lactones could be made from ketoaldehydes using rhodium catalysts, achieving regio- and enantioselective lactones without any waste products. She continues to explore new reagents, catalysts and strategies for organic synthesis.

She was awarded an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship in 2009 and an Amgen Young Investigator in 2010. In 2010 she was awarded the AstraZeneca Award in Chemistry. She won a Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award of the American Chemical Society in 2010 for her contributions to organic chemistry.

She was made an Adrain Brook distinguished professor at the University of Toronto in 2011. That year she won the Roche Excellence in Chemistry award. She was made a Novartis lecturer in 2012 and a Fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science in 2013. She became a lecturer for the Society of Synthetic Organic Chemistry in Japan. She returned to the University of California, Irvine, in 2013. Her group came with her, working on catalytic hydroacylation and the activation of aldehyde C-H bonds. She became an associate editor of the Royal Society of Chemistry journal Chemical Science in 2015. She delivered a talk at TEDxIrvine in 2015, talking about her passion for organic chemistry. She demonstrated that rhodium catalysis could be used to make cyclic peptides. She achieved this by using entirely achiral building blocks and hydrogenation catalysts. Rh-hydride catalysis permits enantioselective reduction and allows access to motifs popular in medicinal chemistry. She combines rhodium with Jacobsen's amine.

Awards and honors

In 2016 she was awarded the Iota Sigma Pi Agnes Fay Morgan Research Award for her exceptional research in catalytic hydroacylation in 2016.In September 2018 it was announced that Dong was the American Chemical Society Elias James Corey Award winner for 2019.