Inorganic Chemistry Seminar: Dr. Kurtis M. Carsch, UC Berkeley
About the Seminar
Manipulating Metal–Ligand Bonds for Catalysis and Separations
The selective activation and functionalization of small molecules is a significant hurdle in addressing contemporary energy-related challenges. Major industrial energy expenditures include catalysis to produce value-added commodity chemicals and separations to purify chemical feedstocks and decarbonize flue gas streams. Toward addressing these objectives, I will discuss my research findings on manipulating metal–ligand bonds to enable selective C–H functionalization and enhance chemical separations.
I will first discuss the characterization of an isolable copper–nitrene reactive intermediate, which exhibits ligand field inversion such that the unpaired electron density resides predominantly on the nitrene fragment. This unusual electron structure facilitates catalytic alkane amination and alkene aziridination. I will then discuss the translation of elementary organometallic transformations into chemical separations via the reversible insertion of industrially important small molecules into labile metal–ligand bonds within crystalline porous materials. Importantly, the thermodynamic and kinetic landscapes of these reversible chemical reactions allow for the decarbonization of high-temperature processes at their relevant operating temperatures. These findings offer new paradigms in chemical separations and expand the design possibilities for adsorbent-based technologies.
About the Speaker
Dr. Kurtis Carsch is an Arnold O. Beckman Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Decarbonization Materials at the University of California, Berkeley, with Prof. Jeffrey Long. Kurtis grew up near Dallas, TX, and began his interest in chemistry by researching methane functionalization with Prof. Thomas Cundari at the University of North Texas. Kurtis then attended Caltech and received a joint B.S./M.S. in chemistry, where he conducted computational and experimental research on bio-inspired clusters of the oxygen-evolving complex in Photosystem II with Prof. Bill Goddard and Prof. Theodor Agapie. As a Hertz Fellow and a NSF Graduate Research Fellow, Kurtis conducted his Ph.D. research with Prof. Theodore Betley at Harvard, where he focused on understanding amination catalysis by copper nitrene intermediates through the lens of inverted ligand fields. His current research focuses on establishing elementary organometallic transformations in the context of chemical separations, exemplified by the discovery of high-temperature adsorbents.