Switchable Catalysis Publication

Matt has just co-authored a publication in Journal of the American Chemical Society with the Miller group at UNC resulting from some of his sabbatical work. The paper describes a powerful approach to switchable catalysis, where hydrogen bonding of a pendant crown ether to a bound ammine ligand can serve as a gate to catalysis that opens in the presence of cations that disrupt hydrogen bonding. The situation is analogous to biological systems, but this approach has not previously been demonstrated in synthetic systems. Congrats especially to Sebas, also to other Miller group members for their fantastic work!

Cooperative Catalysis

We are so excited that our recent work demonstrating a powerful new approach to catalysis using metal/main-group bonds has been published in Angewandte Chemie! We show that an unsaturated Co=Si (cobalt silylene) linkage provides two distinct and orthogonal sites for substrate binding, allowing nitrene-group transfer from an organic azide to carbon monoxide while avoiding interference between the substrates since CO does not bind to silicon. Congrats to undergraduate students Wenlai Han ’23, Helen Jin-Lee ’23, Zach DiNardo ’22, Emma Watson ’23, and Jim Zhang ’18 for their fantastic work, and thanks to collaborator Prof. Dani Kohen!

New Organometallics Paper

Check out our recent collaborative work with Buck Taylor’s (University of Portland) lab on a combined experimental and computational approach to understanding unusual competitive mechanisms in alkene hydrogenation by Rh catalysts!  This paper describes work by Kate DeMeulenaere ’18 and Mike Trenerry ’18.  Congrats to all involved on this well-deserved recognition of some excellent work!