(Graduate Students Initiated)
IMPACT Lecture Series
"Design Principles for Responsive and Cooperative Organometallic Catalysis"
Abstract:
Catalytic transformations are essential to life, yet Nature’s catalysts don’t usually look anything like the catalysts found in the chemical industry. Chemists typically optimize a single catalyst for each reaction, isolating and purifying species at every step. In biological systems, many catalysts operate at the same time in the same place, responding to chemical changes and engaging in complex feedback loops while carrying out multi-step reaction cascades. Efforts to recapitulate some of the functional complexity of Nature’s catalysts in well-defined synthetic organometallic catalysts will be presented. The development of cation-responsive “pincer-crown ether” catalysts elucidates design principles for switchable and tunable catalysis. Incorporating supramolecular crown ether receptor sites on the catalyst enables catalytic transformations of alkenes whereby cations can control the activity and selectivity. Parallel research efforts have focused on developing strategies for integrating organometallic catalysts with electrocatalysts in the same reaction vessel to achieve multi-step reactions.