Event

Design Principles for Responsive and Cooperative Organometallic Catalysis

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.

Biosketch

Alexander Miller is Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Chemistry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH). Alex obtained his B.S. at the University of Chicago in 2005 (working with Prof. Greg Hillhouse), and his Ph.D. at the California Institute of Technology in 2011 (working with Profs. John Bercaw and Jay Labinger). After a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Washington, Seattle working with Profs. Karen Goldberg and James Mayer, Alex joined the faculty at UNC-CH in 2012. His research group takes a mechanism-guided approach to the design and discovery of catalysts for sustainable chemical and fuel synthesis. Alex is the co-founder of The Safety Net, a web resource for academic laboratory safety and co-founded the Department of Chemistry’s Student and Postdoc Wellness (SWELL) Committee.