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!

Lots of new crystal structures

The hard work of CHEM 352 students last term has come to fruition! The awesome group of 9 lab students made and crystallized tons of new complexes as part of three different inorganic experiments, and now three of these structures have been published (LINK TO PAPER) in Acta Crystallographica. This work follows up on several years of experiments by CHEM 352 students exploring solid-state characteristics of Mo(II) acetyl complexes, extending to a series of propionyl complexes featuring differently substituted triarylphosphine ligands. Congrats to Margaret Ball ’21, Alison Block ’22, Ben Brewster ’22, LouLou Ferrer ’22, Helen Jin-Lee ’23, Colby King ’22, Jamie North ’21, Inger Shelton ’22, and David Wilson ’22 for their excellent work!

New Paper

We just published a paper with collaborators at Davidson College in Acta Crystallographica.  The manuscript examines differences between related molybdenum acetyl structures featuring the PTA ligand and its diaceylated DAPTA variant.  Shout out to Prof. Mitch Anstey for identifying PTA as an interesting target for these studies and special thanks to his students at Davidson for excellent work!