Event

Dr. Franc Meyer 

Georg-August-University Göttingen 

-Metalloenzyme active sites provide great inspiration for the design of new types of catalysts for the activation of small inert molecules, and for substrate transformations relevant to sustainable energy schemes. Selected aspects of our recent work in this area will be presented.

Specifically, work in our group has exploited the use of compartmental pyrazolate-based ligand scaffolds for preorganizing two metal ions at tunable distances to enable beneficial metal-metal cooperativity, and to emulate bioinorganic reactivity and isolate key intermediates [1]. The focus of this lecture will be on systems that use H2release from dinuclear metal hydride complexes to provide the required reducing equivalents for the binding and subsequent transformation of ubiquitous molecules such as O2, NO, or N2 [2]. Spectroscopic and kinetic investigations as well as DFT calculations for these systems are revealing electronic structure contributions to reactivity, and are providing important mechanistic insight.

Bio

Franc Meyer earned his Ph.D. with Peter Paetzold at RWTH Aachen (1993, boron chemistry) and was a postdoc with Peter Armentrout at the University of Utah (gas phase guided ion beam studies). On returning to Germany, he completed his Habilitation at the University of Heidelberg in 2000 and became Professor of Inorganic Chemistry at the University of Göttingen in 2001. He is a member of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences, the Royal Physiographic Society in Lund, and the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. His group’s research focuses on the activation of small molecules and on cooperative effects in bimetallic and multimetallic complexes, with particular interests in bioinorganic chemistry, bioinspired catalysis and magnetic nanoswitches.

https://www.uni-goettingen.de/en/prof.+meyer/611272.html

HOST: Tomson