Professor Michael Neidig, University of Rochester

"Structure, Bonding and Mechanism in Iron-Catalyzed Cross-Coupling"

About the Seminar:

Iron-catalyzed C-C cross-coupling reactions have attracted significant interest as versatile and cost effective alternatives to traditional precious metal catalysts, including reactions that have proven difficult for precious metals such as cross-couplings of non-activated alkyl halides. Despite the success of these reactions, the design and development of improved catalysts requires a detailed understanding of the in situ formed iron species and mechanism of catalysis in these systems. However, such investigations are challenging due to the prevalence of paramagnetism in iron species involved in cross-coupling as well as the need to elucidate the individual iron components present in potentially complex mixtures in solution. Our group has pioneered an approach combining inorganic spectroscopic methods (e.g. Mössbauer, MCD, EPR), DFT investigations and synthetic/reaction studies that provides a powerful method to address these challenges and define the active iron species and mechanisms involved in iron-catalyzed cross-coupling. The utilization of this research methodology in several iron-based systems will be presented, including iron-bisphosphine and simple ferric salt systems. This work has led to the isolation and characterization of novel iron-ate species as well as the direct determination of the active species involved in iron-bisphosphine catalyzed aryl-alkyl cross-couplings.

About the Speaker:

Mike received his B.A. in chemistry from Colgate University in 1999. Following studies at the University of Cambridge as a Churchill Scholar, leading to an M.Phil. degree in chemistry, he moved to Stanford University where he received his Ph.D. in chemistry in 2007. At Stanford, Michael became interested in the use of physical-inorganic spectroscopic methods to understand transition metal catalytic systems in biological systems. Following brief stops at Dow Chemical as a Senior Research Chemist and Los Alamos National Laboratory as a Director’s Postdoctoral Fellow, Michael joined the Department of Chemistry at the University of Rochester in 2011 as an assistant professor. His research at Rochester focuses on the generation of new fundamental insight into structure, bonding and mechanism in homogeneous non-precious metal catalysts. Current areas of interest include structure, bonding and mechanism in (1) iron-catalyzed cross-coupling, (2) iron- and cobalt-catalyzed direct C-H funtionalization and (3) iron and cobalt pincer complexes.