Distinguished Women In Science: Professor Jenny Yang, UC Irvine

Distinguished Women In Science: Professor Jenny Yang, UC Irvine (Host: Keith Armstrong)

About the Seminar

"Electrifying the Secondary Coordination Sphere: Proximal Cations and Their Effect on Redox Reactivity"

Non-redox active Lewis acidic metal cations play a key role in a diverse set of biological and synthetic transition metal complexes that mediate redox activity. One of their proposed roles in promoting reactivity is by tuning the redox potential of the reaction site. We investigated whether non-redox active cations engender this change through an inductive effect, which would change the electronic structure of the redox active cation, or through an electrostatic effect, which would uniformly shift the molecular orbitals on the redox active metal due to the electric field potential of the proximal cation. Our study, which utilized a Schiff base ligand with an appended crown-like functionality that incorporates a variety of alkali and alkaline earth metals, indicates an electrostatic effect is likely dominant. Subsequent studies suggest the redox potential shifts due to the electric field potential of a proximal cation can result in catalytic activity that breaks scaling relationships between potential and reactivity.

About the Speaker

Jenny received her BS at UC Berkeley (with Jeff Long), PhD at MIT with Daniel Nocera, and a postdoc with Daniel Dubois at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. She worked as a research scientist for several years until she made the jump into academia and started her current position at UCI. She has two boys under 5 that keep her busy but pre-pandemic she used to enjoy playing ice hockey and ultimate frisbee.