Changing Chemical Synthesis with Catalysis: CCEW-3

Event date:

Sep 8 2021 9:00 am

Changing Chemical Synthesis with Catalysis: CCEW-3

Speaker(s)

Prof. John Hartwig

Venue

Zoom/Online

Abstract

From Prozac to perfume, sustainable plastics to solar energy, catalysis enables our current standard of living and controls our potential to progress sustainably. The reduced emissions of modern cars, the abundance of fresh food at our stores, the beginnings of green energy, and the new pharmaceuticals we use to treat disease are made possible by chemical reactions controlled by catalysts. Research in my group has sought to design catalysts that can introduce and manipulate functional groups in both small and large organic molecules. These reactions encompass novel coupling processes(1) to facilitate the synthesis of medicinally important molecules, reactions that enable the introduction of fluorine and new fluoroalkyl substituents, and reactions that enable the introduction of functional groups into positions of molecules inaccessible by classical organic reactions.(2, 3) This lecture will introduce the importance of catalysis overall, some major challenges in the field, and ways that our group is seeking to address these challenges. Examples of important catalysts used today, and examples of strategies to discover and develop new classes of catalysts for future applications will be presented.

The Department of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering is holding its third seminar session on 8 September 2021, at 9am PKST (GMT +5) via Zoom. In this session, Professor John Hartwig, from the University of California, Berkeley will be talking about 'Changing Chemical Synthesis with Catalysis".

About the speaker:

John F. Hartwig is one of the leading scientists in the field of catalysis. He received PhD in Chemistry from UC Berkeley in 1990 and started his academic career as an Assistant Professor at Yale University in 1992 and was promoted to professor in 2008. Prof. Harwig was a junior professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign before moving to the UC Berkeley where he is Henry Rapoport Chair in Organic Chemistry, and Senior Faculty Scientist, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory since 2011.

Prof. Hartwig’s research group focuses on the discovery and understanding of new reactions of organic compounds catalyzed by transition metal complexes and artificial metalloenzymes. These findings result from a combination of organic synthesis, organometallic synthesis, protein design and evolution, and mechanistic analysis of catalytic systems.

Prof. Hartwig has numerous awards and names lectureships to his credit. For instance, he was awarded ACS Catalysis Lectureship (2013), ACS Award in Synthetic Organic Chemistry (2004), national Institute of health MERIT Award (2014).

Registration: Please register at https://forms.gle/mD2zUc8oBueEc8ow5 to attend the live Zoom session.

Registration link