Professor Karen I. Goldberg, University of Washington

Professor Karen I. Goldberg, University of Washington
Date
Mon November 2nd 2015, 4:30pm
Location
Braun Lecture Hall
S.G. Mudd Building
Stanford University

“Catalysis, Mechanistic Understanding and Collaboration as Tools to Sustainable Production of Chemicals and Fuels”

About the Seminar:

The NSF Phase II Center for Chemical Innovation, the Center for Enabling New Technologies through Catalysis (CENTC), established in 2007, involves 19 investigators and their students working at 15 different institutions across North America.  This large team of chemists and chemical engineers has been working collaboratively to develop efficient and selective methods for the production of chemicals and fuels from a variety of feedstocks. Through the creation of new catalytic processes, CENTC researchers seek to lower energy costs in chemical production, use inexpensive, readily available, and nontoxic reagents, and to generate less overall waste. The goal is to move towards sustainability in the production of chemicals and fuels in the 21st century. To do this successfully on large scale, more efficient and selective means to transform C-H, C-C, C-O, C-N, O-H, and N-H bonds are needed and CENTC scientists have been working together on developing such reactions. This presentation will highlight some contributions from CENTC in general, and more specifically those from the Goldberg lab, emphasizing catalyst design and mechanistic understanding of fundamental bond cleavage and formation reactions mediated by metal complexes.

About the Speaker:

Karen Goldberg received her A.B. degree in 1983 from Barnard College of Columbia University in New York City.  She did undergraduate research with Professors Roald Hoffmann (Cornell University) and Stephen Lippard (Columbia University) and with Drs. Tom Graedel and Steven Bertz (AT&T Laboratories).  She then went on to the University of California at Berkeley where she earned her Ph.D. in Chemistry in 1988 with Professor Robert Bergman.  Following a postdoctoral year with Professor Bruce Bursten (Ohio State University), she joined the faculty at Illinois State University, a primarily undergraduate institution in 1989.

In 1995, she moved to the University of Washington in Seattle as Assistant Professor of Chemistry.  She was awarded tenure and promoted to Associate Professor in 2000.  In 2003, she was promoted to full professor, in 2007 was named Lawton Distinguished Scholar in Chemistry, and in 2010 became the Nicole A. Boand Endowed Professor in Chemistry.

Professor Goldberg currently serves as Director of the NSF Phase II Center for Chemical Innovation, the Center for Enabling New Technologies through Catalysis (CENTC), a collaborative effort between 19 principal investigators and their students at 15 institutions across North America (America (www.nsfcentc.org). CENTC also has a industrial affiliates program involving major chemical, petrochemical and pharmaceutical companies.

She has served on the Advisory Boards of the ACS journals Inorganic Chemistry, Accounts of Chemical Research and Organometallics and as co-Chair of the 2012 Gordon Research Conference on Green Chemistry. Goldberg also serves as a member of the Chemistry Selection Committee for Sloan Research Fellowships and a member of the Advisory Committee for the Solvay Institutes. She was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a member of the Washington State Academy of Science in 2012. She was awarded the 2015 Carol Tyler Award from the International Precious Metal Institute and will be awarded the 2016 ACS Award in Organometallic Chemistry next year.

Professor Goldberg is best known for her work developing mechanistic understanding of fundamental organometallic reactions. She has been an invited speaker at conferences and universities around the world and has published over 110 papers.  To date, over 50 graduate students and postdoctoral research associates and more than 50 undergraduate students have trained in her laboratories.

The 2015-2016 Student Hosted Colloquium is sponsored by Dow ChemicalGenentech and Merck.