Professor Josh Figueroa, University of California San Diego

"Unsaturated Metal Isocyanides"

About the Seminar: 

Recent results concerning the construction and reactivity of low-coordinate transition-metal complexes featuring sterically encumbering m-terphenyl isocyanide ligands are presented. Given the isolobal relationship between organoisocyanides and carbon monoxide, these complexes serve as mimics of the unsaturated binary metal carbonyls. The latter have traditionally been studied in either the gas phase or by matrix-isolation techniques and, consequently, their condensed-phase reactivity patterns are largely unknown. Specifically addressed will be synthetic studies that have delivered homoleptic and heteroleptic two-, three- and four-coordinate isocyanide complexes that mimic several unsaturated binary carbonyls for the middle and late transition metals. 

About the Speaker:

Joshua S. Figueroa completed his graduate studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2005 under the direction of Christopher C. Cummins. From 2005-2007, he was a National Institutes of Health Postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia University in the laboratory of Gerard Parkin. In July 2007, he started his independent career at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) with a research program focused on synthetic inorganic and organometallic chemistry and homogeneous catalysis. Josh’s research and educational efforts have been recognized with a number of awards, including the Camille and Henry Dreyfus New Faculty Award (2007), National Science Foundation CAREER Award (2009), Research Corporation, Cottrell Scholar Award (2010), an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship (2011), the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE, 2011), Department of Energy Early Career Research Award (2012) and the Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award (2012). He was named a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (UK) in 2014.