Inorganic Chemistry Seminar: Guy Bertrand, UC San Diego
Inorganic Chemsitry Seminar: Guy Bertrand, UC San Diego (Host: Bob Waymouth)
About the Speaker
Guy Bertrand studied chemistry at the University of Montpellier and received his PhD from the University Paul Sabatier in Toulouse. After being a CNRS group leader (French National Center for Scientific Research) at the University of Toulouse, and then at the Laboratoire de Chimie de Coordination du CNRS, he has been the Director of the Laboratoire d'Hétérochimie Fondamentale et Appliquée at the University Paul Sabatier from 1998 to 2005. From 2001 to 2012 he served as the Director of the UCR/CNRS Joint Research Chemistry Laboratory that he created, and since July 2012 he is Distinguished Professor and Director of the UCSD/CNRS Joint Research Chemistry Laboratory at the University of California at San Diego. He is a member of the French Academy of Technology (2000), the Academia Europaea (2002), the European Academy of Sciences (2003), the French Academy of Sciences (2004), and is a Fellow of the American Association for Advancement of Sciences (2006). He has recently received the Sir Ronald Nyholm Medal of the RSC (2009), the Grand Prix Le Bel of the French Chemical Society (2010), the ACS Award in Inorganic Chemistry (2014), the Sir Geoffrey Wilkinson Award of the RSC (2016), and the Sacconi Medal of the Italian Chemical Society (2017). He is one the Associate Editors of Chemical reviews, and a member of the Editorial Board of several journals.
About the Seminar
"Stable carbenes and related species as powerful tools in organic, organometallic, and inorganic chemistry"
The preparation, structure and electronic properties of novel families of stable carbenes (1), including six-membered cyclic (alkyl)(amino)carbenes (2), bicyclic (alkyl)(amino)carbenes (3), and even mono-substituted carbenes (4) will be discussed. It will be shown that the peculiar electronic and steric properties of these carbenes (CAACs) allow for the stabilization of unusual diamagnetic and paramagnetic transition metals and main group element species (5,6).
We will also show that these carbenes allow for the isolation of catalytically active complexes, which were supposed to be only transient intermediates. Among them, bis(copper) complexes involved in the very popular CuAAC reaction (Click Chemistry) will be discussed (7). We will show that this discovery allows for the development of novel catalytic transformations (8,9).