Prof. Haiping Xia’s group has been devoted into the work related to synthesis, reactivity, and characterization of aromatic compounds and made great progress on it. Most recently, this group published a review article of “The Chemistry of Aromatic Osmacycles” to summarize the development of transition-metal-containing aromatic molecules for the past three decades, particularly the synthesis and reactivity of metallabenzenes. Another focus has been the preparation and characterization of other metalla-aromatics such as metallafurans, metallapyridines, metallaben-zynes, and more. Despite significant advances, remaining challenges in this field include the limited number of convenient and versatile synthetic methods to construct stable and fully characterized metalla-aromatics, and the relative shortage of new topologies.To address these challenges, they have developed new methods for preparing metalla-aromatics, especially those possessing new topologies. Their synthetic efforts have led to a large family of closely related metalla-aromatics known as aromatic osmacycles. we have synthesized aromatic osmacycles such as osmabenzene, osmabenzyne, isoosmabenzene, osmafuran, and osmanaphthalene. Furthermore, these methods have also created a series of new topologies, such as osmabenzothiazole and osmapyridyne.

Meanwhile, the extraordinarily rich chemistry and diversified structures of their osma-aromatics corroborate the importance of metalla-aromatics, which remain as an active area of exploration; this field should have a bright and rapidly evolving future. On the other hand, the good stability of their osmacycles in air, water, and heat may enable their potential applications as materials. They have investigated, for the firsttime, the optical, electrochemical, and magnetic properties of these intriguing metalla-aromatics. Some of these properties are promising for use in materials science. They envision that the different substituent, metals, organic fragments, and ligands will further expand the family of metalla-aromatics, thus creating a multitude of candidates for various applications in the field of material science. (Acc. Chem. Res., 2014, 47, 341)