Monday, April 18 in CUB Junior Ballroom (rm 212)
Please join the reception at 10:30 a.m. and the lecture at 11:10 a.m.
The Gene and Linda Voiland School of Chemical Engineering and Bioengineering is hosting the 2016 ENSOR LECTURESHIP featuring Bruce Gates-University of California, Davis
Bruce Gates studied chemical engineering at Berkeley (B.S., 1961) and the University of Washington (PhD, 1966) and with a Fulbright grant did postdoctoral research at the Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich. He worked for two years as a research engineer at Chevron Research Company and began as an assistant professor at the University of Delaware in 1969, becoming the H. Rodney Sharp Professor of Chemical Engineering and Professor of Chemistry. In 1992 he joined the University of California, Davis, where he is Distinguished Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science. He has spent four sabbatical years at the Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich and was recently a guest professor at Hokkaido University. Gates’s research is focused on catalysis, with an emphasis on essentially molecular metal complex and metal cluster catalysts anchored to solid surfaces and on catalytic conversion of biomass-derived compounds. He authored the textbooks “Catalytic Chemistry” and co-authored “Chemistry of Catalytic Processes.” He edited the monograph Advances in Catalysis for 18 years. He serves on the U.S. Department of Energy’s Basic Energy Sciences Advisory Committee. He has been recognized with awards from the American Chemical Society, American Institute of Chemical Engineers, the North American Catalysis Society, and the Council for Chemical Research. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering.
Molecular Metal Catalysts on Supports: Organometallic Chemistry Meets Surface Science
Industrial catalysts range from the simple—molecules in solution—to the complex—surfaces of robust solids, and these are represented respectively by the fields of organometallic chemistry and surface science. These fields are now rapidly merging, benefiting from synthetic chemistry showing the way to essentially molecular metal-containing species anchored on solid supports. The best understood of these catalysts are highly uniform, being isolated on crystalline supports such as zeolites and metal organic frameworks. Less uniform supports such as crystalline MgO are helping to move this field a step closer toward the complexity of technological catalysts incorporating metal oxide supports. The catalyst syntheses involve reactions of organometallic compounds (e.g., Ir(C2H4)2(acetylacetonate)) with OH groups on support surfaces—to give structures such as Ir(C2H4)2, with the Ir atom bonded to two support oxygen atoms. Spectra, atomic-resolution electron microscopy images, and calculations at the level of density functional theory characterize the surface structures and demonstrate their high degrees of uniformity. Catalyst performance data representing families of isostructural catalyst precursors, such as M(C2H4)2, M(CO)(C2H4), and M(CO)2 (M = Rh, Ir), show how the metals and ligands affect catalytic properties—just as in molecular homogeneous catalysis. New catalysts provide potentially valuable properties, such as high selectivity for hydrogenation of 1,4-butadiene to give butenes catalyzed by selectively poisoned dirhodium species on MgO. The new results are helping to unravel the effects of the design variables of site-isolated catalysts: the metal, the number of metal atoms in a catalytic site, the support, and other groups (ligands) bonded to the metal—thereby laying a foundation for a role of theory in catalyst design.
