On the morning of December 17, 2025, Prof. Xinglong Zhang from The Chinese University of Hong Kong was invited to the College of Chemistry, delivering an academic lecture titled “Mechanistic Insights into Homogeneous Catalysis Accelerated by Automated Computational Workflows.”

The lecture shared how computational chemistry methods can be employed to gain deep insights into the mechanistic nature of homogeneous catalytic reactions, unveiling reaction pathways and the origins of chemo-, regio-, and enantioselectivity. It also introduced the open-source Python toolkit CHEMSMART developed by Prof. Zhang's research group, which can be used for high-throughput generation of computational chemistry data for machine learning applications. The attending faculty and students were fully immersed in this intellectual feast.