Thomas Lectka

About

Thomas Lectka is the Jean and Norman Scowe Professor in the Department of Chemistry at Johns Hopkins University. He graduated from Oberlin College with highest honors in Chemistry in 1985 and received his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1990, studying with Professor John McMurry. His postdoctoral studies included work as an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at Heidelberg with Rolf Gleiter and as an NIH Fellow at Harvard University with Professor David Evans. He joined the Johns Hopkins faculty in 1994 and was promoted to his current professorship in 2012. His research employs the tools of organic, fluorine, and inorganic chemistry to develop new reactions of academic and pharmaceutical interest, with a focus on metal catalysis and photochemistry. Key research goals include aliphatic fluorination and selective bond activation. His group studies reaction mechanisms through various techniques such as kinetics, EPR, NMR, voltammetry, crystallography, and advanced computations like DFT and MP2. Notable contributions include the synthesis of the first fluoronium ion in solution, as predicted by DFT theory, and the development of fundamentally new reactions and species with unusual properties. Professor Lectka has received numerous awards, including an NIH First Award, NSF Career Award, Eli Lilly Grantee Award, Sloan Fellowship, Dreyfus-Teacher-Scholar Award, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, and the ACS Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award in 2024. He has also been recognized as…

Research topics

• Chemistry
• Organic chemistry
• Computational chemistry
• Photochemistry
• Stereochemistry
• Combinatorial chemistry
• Medicinal chemistry

Selected publications

• Carbonyl-Directed Aliphatic Fluorination: A Special Type of Hydrogen Atom Transfer Beats Out Norrish II

  Journal of the American Chemical Society · 2020 · 55 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  F NMR, electrochemical studies, synthetic probes, and computational experiments. To our surprise, the mechanism suggests intermolecular hydrogen atom transfer (HAT) chemistry is at play, rather than classical Norrish hydrogen atom abstraction as initially conceived. What is more, we discovered a unique role for photopromoters such as benzil and related compounds that necessitates their chemical transformation through fluorination in order to be effective. Our findings provide documentation of an…

  DOI

• Site-Selective Photochemical Fluorination of Ketals: Unanticipated Outcomes in Selectivity and Stability

  The Journal of Organic Chemistry · 2020 · 45 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  C-H fluorination of acetonide ketals that presents interesting problems in chemical reactivity. The question of why certain products of the reaction are stable while others are not is addressed, as is the question of why only select α-ethereal hydrogen atoms are targeted in the reaction. We demonstrate that the method can be employed to synthesize unprecedented fluorinated sugars and steroids, and it can also be applied toward the fluorination of carbamates. Though some substrates contain up to…

  DOI

• Hydroxy-directed fluorination of remote unactivated C(sp³)–H bonds: a new age of diastereoselective radical fluorination

  Chemical Science · 2022 · 35 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  H HOESY experiments, calculations, and more.

  DOI

• Selective Fluorination of Complex Molecules: Late-Stage Functionalization

  Chemical Reviews · 2025-07-21 · 21 citations

  reviewSenior authorCorresponding

  It has been more than 160 years since chemists first performed fluorination reactions on organic molecules. Scores of fluorination reagents and hundreds of worthwhile methods have been developed over the intervening years. Meanwhile, workers in the field are increasingly aware of the benefits of incorporating fluorine atoms into bioactive molecules. Therefore, the emergence of “late-stage fluorination” in the first decade of the 21st century is both natural and well-justified─an extant compound,…

  PublisherDOI

• Competition between C–C and C–H Bond Fluorination: A Continuum of Electron Transfer and Hydrogen Atom Transfer Mechanisms

  Journal of the American Chemical Society · 2023-10-04 · 15 citations

  articleCorresponding

  In 2015, we reported a photochemical method for directed C–C bond cleavage/radical fluorination of relatively unstrained cyclic acetals using Selectfluor and catalytic 9-fluorenone. Herein, we provide a detailed mechanistic study of this reaction, during which it was discovered that the key electron transfer step proceeds through substrate oxidation from a Selectfluor-derived N-centered radical intermediate (rather than through initially suspected photoinduced electron transfer). This finding le…

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• Lewis Base Directed Intermolecular Hydrogen Atom Transfer

  NSF · $500k · 2021–2025

• NIH Grant R01GM064559

  NIH · $2.0M · 2010

• Polycomponent Catalysis in Organic Synthesis

  NSF · $405k · 2012–2015

Frequent coauthors

• Maxime A. Siegler

  95 shared

• Travis Dudding

  Brock University

  65 shared

• Cody Ross Pitts

  64 shared

• Maxwell Gargiulo Holl

  45 shared

• Muhammad Kazim

  37 shared

• Andrew E. Taggi

  FMC (United States)

  35 shared

• Stefan Andrew Harry

  Center for Cancer Research

  32 shared

• Michael T. Scerba

  National Institutes of Health

  31 shared

Labs

• The Lectka GroupPI

Awards & honors

• NIH First Award
• NSF Career Award
• Eli Lilly Grantee Award
• Sloan Fellowship
• Dreyfus-Teacher-Scholar Award

Similar researchers at Johns Hopkins University

• Kenneth Karlinh-96
• David Goldbergh-61
• Steven Rokitah-56