Nickel-based catalysts have been applied to the catalytic reactions for transfer hydrogenation of carbonyl compounds. In the present work, highly dispersed nickel particles located at the pores of mesoporous silica spheres (Ni@mSiO 2 ) were prepared via an optimized melt infiltration route. The nickel nanoparticles of 10 wt% in the Ni@mSiO 2 catalyst could be uniformly loaded with high dispersion of 36.3%, resulting excellent performance for catalytic transfer hydrogenation of aryl ketones.Scheme 1 A brief synthetic scheme of Ni@mSiO 2 nanocatalyst.