Our recent paper on using cobalt silylenes as platforms for group-transfer reactions has been designated as a “Hot Paper” by Angewandte Chemie! This is awesome news, congratulations to all involved! The paper is also dedicated to the memory of Prof. Bob Grubbs, a true luminary in chemistry and a caring mentor to many generations of students, postdocs, and faculty (including Matt).
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!
Metal/Main-Group Cooperation Review
Matt’s Perspective paper on using pincer-type complexes to investigate cooperative reactivity between metals and metalloids is now out! The article focuses especially on contributions to this field by Carleton undergraduate researchers in the Whited lab. Check it out here!
Bimetallic small-molecule reductions
We are so excited that our recent work, showing a really cool and distinct approach to reducing small molecules like CO2 and ethylene, has been published in Angewandte Chemie! These findings show a really fascinating way that silylene ligands can template multimetallic redox reactions, and we think they may be extended more broadly to a variety of 3d metals. Congrats to students Jim Zhang ’18, Jason Ma ’18, and Anna Conley ’20 as well as collaborators Prof. Dani Kohen and Prof. Daron Janzen for their awesome work!!
Cobalt Silylene!
We have just reported our collaborative work with the Ozerov group (Texas A&M) preparing the first example of a base-free cobalt silylene (cobalt-silicon double bond) in Organometallics. Congrats to Jim for his excellent work on this project and thanks to all our wonderful collaborators who contributed to the work.
New paper in Dalton
Our ruthenium work has just been published! Check out Binh, Jim, and Jason’s awesome work demonstrating silylene-assisted hydride transfer to CO2.
