In this report, it is demonstrated that chiral vinyl aziridines can be stereospecifically ring expanded. This synthetic approach allows controlled access to chiral 2,5-cis or 2,5-trans-3-pyrroline products from starting materials with the appropriate aziridine geometry. Twenty three ring expansion examples, most of which feature a stereospecific cyclization, are presented.A cursory review of the structural motifs of the top 200 top selling drugs 1 reveals that around 90% contain at least one nitrogen atom and approximately 65% are decorated with a heterocycle. Not surprisingly, the majority of these heterocycles are nitrogenous, with pyrrolidines a commonly occurring heterocyclic scaffold. Given the success of chiral pyrrolidines as important pharmaceutical building blocks it follows that a range of practical synthetic methods are needed 2 to provide access to any targeted structural and stereochemical pyrrolidine pattern.We have chosen to tackle the challenge of developing useful pyrrolidine forming methods by revisiting the ring expansion of vinyl aziridines, first reported by Atkinson. 3 Surprisinigly, despite the potential usefulness of converting a vinylaziridine into a 3-pyrroline, there had only been a single study focused on using metal catalysts to aid the rearrangement prior to our contribution to this field. 4 Oshima and coworkers found that tosylated dieneaziridines could be ring expanded in the presence of a palladium catalyst to the 3-pyrrolines. Both the N-tosyl group and the diene moiety were reported to be essential for the success of this rearrangement. Simple non-dienic vinyl aziridines did not ring expand, furnishing instead a complex mixture of products. In our recent report, we demonstrated that this significant substrate limitation could be solved using Cu(hfacac) 2 as a catalyst. 5 The substrate scope of this new transformation, which we demonstrated for a range of tosyl (Ts) and N-phthalimide (NPhth) protected vinyl aziridines, was shown to be quite broad. In this report we expand these investigations further and focus our attention on stereospecific vinyl aziridine ring expansions and application of this new methods towards accessing chiral pyrroline products.njardars@email.arizona.edu. Supporting Information Available Full experimental details for all new compounds reported in this article including X-ray data for compounds 15d, 15j, 15l, 21d and 21f are available free of charge via the Internet at http://pubs.acs.org. In order to maximize the synthetic potential of our method for preparing chiral pyrroline products, it is essential that reliable, asymmetric, convergent, and scalable routes be available to access the requisite starting materials (chiral vinyl aziridines). 6 The union of an imine and suitably activated nucleophile quickly emerged as the optimal approach (Scheme 1). The imine based retrosynthetic analysis is highlighted for chiral pyrroline 3, which we envisioned would originate from the copper catalyzed ring expansion of a trans-or cis-vinyl aziridine (4 and ...