Speaker: Professor Michael G. Organ, The Department of Chemistry and Biomolecular Sciences, University of Ottawa
Title: Advancing Synthetic Chemistry Through Catalysis and Catalyst Design
Date, Time and Place: Friday, November 30, 10 am, 238 TB
Considerable effort for almost half a century has been devoted to understanding how ligand
steric and electronic properties modulate the reactivity of a metal centre in a large number of
catalytic processes. This is confounded by the fact that many of these transformations have two
or more steps in their catalytic cycles, which may mean that a favourable attribute in one step
may act to disfavour another step. Many groups have worked diligently to develop methods to
probe, and scales to grade ligand properties such that they can be used in, ideally, a predictive
fashion to guide the development of new catalysts. In this presentation our approach to rational
ligand design in cross-coupling applications will be discussed and how this approach has been used to improve catalyst performance. In particular, time will be dedicated to the discussion of 1) the incorporation of secondary alkyl centres without isomerization and 2) in the introduction of primary amines without over arylation.
