Our program centers around the discovery of catalytic carbon-carbon and carbon-heteroatom bond forming reactions based on C-H activation. Target transformations are selected to enable 1) the use of simple and abundant starting materials such as aliphatic acids, amines and alcohols, and 2) disconnections that drastically shorten the synthesis of drug molecules or a major class of biologically active compounds. Ultimately, we hope to develop catalytic reactions to parallel enzymatic transformations in terms of reactivity and selectivity.