Chemistry

Biographical Info

Bioinspired Metal Complexes as Catalysts

Our focus is to design, synthesize, and evaluate transition metal complexes for small molecule activation. In particular, our group is interested in energy-related processes, such as water oxidation, carbon dioxide reduction, and dioxygen reduction.

Metal clusters housed within the active sites of proteins carry out basic and challenging redox reactions, such as carbon dioxide reduction or nitrogen fixation. We expect that well-defined and tunable metal clusters can function as highly efficient catalysts in synthetic systems. Our goal is to develop multimetallic complexes in which a tunable ligands controls the assembly and environment of each metal ion within a cluster (e.g., donor atom type, metal-metal distance). Importantly, one design criterion is that complexes retain an active site, which we anticipate will afford selective reactivity with substrates and increase the catalytic efficiency.