Mayuko Isomura

Mayuko was born and raised in Tokyo, Japan. She received her B.S. and M.S. degrees in chemistry from the University of Tokyo, where she conducted research in the laboratory of Prof. Eiichi Nakamura and Prof. Laurean Illies. During her undergraduate and master's studies, she worked on indole synthesis via vicinal dimetallic intermediates. In 2016, she moved to Switzerland to pursue her doctoral studies at ETH Zürich as a recipient of the Funai Overseas Scholarship and earned her D.Sc. in 2020 under the direction of Prof. Erick M. Carreira, where she developed iridium-catalyzed enantioselective allenylic substitution reactions with detailed mechanistic studies. Following her doctoral studies, she joined the group of Prof. Eric N. Jacobsen at Harvard University as an SNSF and JSPS postdoctoral fellow. There, she developed methodologies to access chiral building blocks enabled by hydrogen-bond-donor catalysis and investigated the relationship between catalyst structure and substrate generality.In 2025, Mayuko started her independent career as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign, where her research focuses on developing new catalytic strategies for C-N bond formation.