The development of catalysts to increase the chemical efficiency or to find completely new chemical reactions has found great interest. For this a wide variety of ligands are needed. The doctoral is supervised by Hector Fellow A. Stephen K. Hashmi and aims at developing new ligands that are based on the formal double deprotonation of 1,3-diketones and thereby enlarging the chemical space of known ligands. For this new synthetic methods have to be found and the obtained ligands have to be tested and characterised.