Jin-Quan Yu received his B.S. in Chemistry at East China Normal University, where he worked with Professor Li-Xin Dai and Professor Bi-Qi Wu as a visiting student at Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1987. He went to Cambridge University for his doctoral studies under the supervision of Prof. J. B. Spencer, where he studied biosynthesis and the mechanistic details of the hydrometallation step in asymmetric hydrogenation. He was elected as a Junior Research Fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge University in 1998. From 2001-2002, Jin-Quan worked on Pd-catalyzed allylic oxidation as a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard University in the laboratories of Professor E. J. Corey. He returned to Cambridge University in 2002 and was appointed as a University Royal Society Research Fellow in 2003 to start his independent research towards developing asymmetric C–H insertion reactions. In 2004, he moved to Brandeis University as an Assistant Professor of Chemistry. He joined The Scripps Research Institute as an Associate Professor in 2007 and became a full Professor in August 2010. He was appointed as the Frank and Bertha Hupp Professor of Chemistry at The Scripps Research Institute in 2012. He received the Mukaiyama Award in 2012, the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Prize in the Physical Sciences in 2013, the Elias J. Corey Award in 2014, the MacArthur Fellowship in 2016, and the Pedler Award in 2017. Research in his group focuses on developing C–H activation reactions to provide new disconnections for asymmetric synthesis and catalytic processes. In the past 15 years, he has developed new ligands and strategies to achieve enantioselective and remote C–H activation reactions of synthetically relevant substrates (>300 publications on C–H activation). C–H activation reactions developed in his laboratory have been used in pharma industry including BMS, Pfizer, Vertex, Novartis, AbbVie, GSK, Genentech, Boehringer Ingelheim, Amgen, Abide and Eisai. He also cofounded a drug discovery company, Vividion, to exploit the power of C–H activation technologies.