A chemistry postdoctoral researcher was killed in some sort of explosion or fire at Tsinghua University on Friday, according to a post by the university on the microblogging site Weibo. If other media reports are correct, the deceased postdoc is Xiangjian Meng, and he joined the university in 2014 after many years at the Shanghai Institute of Technical Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

The university has not released any details about the incident. A couple of early news reports mentioned tert-butyllithium as a possible culprit and another referenced an "organic catalysis experiment." Chinese media reports on Sunday pointed to hydrogen as the culprit, so perhaps it was a hydrogenation reaction?

Various stories (translations courtesy of Google):

And a thread on reddit chemistry: Wow. Fire/Explosion leads to PostDoc death at Tsinghua University