Monday, December 5, at 12:10 p.m. in Todd 334
The Gene and Linda Voiland School of Chemical Engineering and Bioengineering are hosting a seminar presented by Zachariah Heiden, Assistant Professor in Chemistry, at Washington State University.
Zach is a native of the Midwest growing up in Wisconsin where he attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison earning his B.S. in Chemical Engineering with an additional major in Chemistry in 2004. He then moved to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he earned his PhD in chemistry in 2008. After a three-year postdoc at the University of Toronto and a two-year postdoc at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in the Center for Molecular Electrocatalysis, he began his career at Washington State University in 2013 where he is currently an Assistant Professor of Chemistry. His research interests include using catalysis and inorganic chemistry to solve problems in energy and sustainability.
Controlling Homogeneous Catalyst Reactivity with Redox Centers
Catalysts have been widely implemented in chemical transformations to reduce energy requirements and increase product selectivity. Due to the ease of separation of the catalyst from the reaction products, heterogeneous catalysts are often the catalysts of choice for industrial processes. Although heterogeneous catalysts are often preferred in chemical reactions, homogeneous catalysts exhibit their own benefits and are more desirable than heterogeneous catalysts for some catalytic transformations. The design of homogeneous catalysts often requires a good deal of trial and error, as the requirements of an active catalyst are not always intuitive. If one designs a catalyst that does not exhibit the desired reactivity, one often has to go back to the drawing board and modify the catalyst design. One approach to reduce the need to “go back to the drawing board” is the concept of post-synthetic modifications, where the catalyst structure can be altered after its initial synthesis to influence its catalytic activity. This talk will discuss how the Heiden research group uses a computational guided approach for the design of homogeneous catalysts capable of post-synthetic modifications. This talk will also discuss the synthetic efforts in the development of fluorescent main group-based dye molecules to develop molecular catalysts that are capable of undergoing switchable reactivity, where the catalytic activity of a homogeneous catalyst can be controlled through a ligand-based redox event.
