Inorganic Chemistry Seminar: Professor Ed Solomon, Stanford University
About the Seminar
"Geometric and Electronic Structural Contributions to Fe/O2 Reactivity: Correlations between metalloenzyme and heterogeneous catalysis"
Most of the major classes of non-heme iron metalloenzymes use high spin Fe(II) sites to activate O2. These had been refractory to spectroscopic definition. Thus we developed a variable-temperature, variable-field magnetic circular dichroism (VTVH MCD) spectroscopic methodology that defined a general mechanistic strategy used by these non-heme Fe(II) enzyme classes to control O2 activation. This leads to Fe/O2 intermediates that go on to perform a wide range of selective catalysis. This talk will then focus on using Nuclear Resonance Vibrational Spectroscopy (NRVS) to define the geometric structures and VTVH MCD the electronic structures of Fe(IV)=O intermediates in these metalloenzymes and, coupled to electronic structure calculations, define how their Frontier Molecular Orbitals (FMOs) control reactivity. These methods will then be extended with site selectivity to define the Fe active sites in metallozeolites that take CH4 to CH3OH at room temperature and their relation to the metalloenzymes.
About the Speaker
Professor Edward Solomon’s research spans the fields of physical-inorganic, bioinorganic, and theoretical-inorganic chemistry. His work focuses on spectroscopic elucidation of the electronic structure of transition metal complexes and its contribution to reactivity. He has developed new spectroscopic and electronic structure methods and applied these to active sites in catalysis. He has made significant contributions to our understanding of metal sites involved in electron and oxo transfer, copper sites involved in O2 binding, activation and reduction to water, in structure/function correlations over non-heme iron enzymes, and in the correlation of biological to heterogeneous catalysis.
Edward I. Solomon grew up in North Miami Beach, Florida, received his Ph.D. at Princeton (1972) and was a postdoctoral fellow at The Ørsted Institute in Denmark and at Caltech. He started his career at MIT in late 1975, became a full professor in 1981, and joined the faculty at Stanford in 1982, where he is now the Monroe E. Spaght Professor of Humanities and Sciences and Professor of Photon Science at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. He has been a visiting professor in France, Argentina, Japan, China, India, Australia, and Brazil. He has received ACS National Awards in Inorganic Chemistry, Distinguished Service in the Advancement of Inorganic Chemistry, the Alfred Bader Award in Bioinorganic or Bioorganic Chemistry, the Ira Remsen Award, and the Kosolapoff Award, the Centenary Medal from the Royal Society of Chemistry (UK), the Wheland Medal from the University of Chicago, the Bailar Medal from the University of Illinois, the Frontiers in Biological Chemistry Award from the Max-Planck- Institute (Mülheim), the Chakravorty Award from the Chemical Research Society of India and the Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching at Stanford among others. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Fellow in the American Association for the Advancement of Science and in the American Chemical Society.
Joining via Zoom:
Meeting ID: 995 8693 3171
Password: 118809