Professor Don Tilley, Department of Chemistry, University of California at Berkeley is supported by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic and Organometallic Chemistry Program to prepare and investigate silicon-based compounds and materials that possess chemical, structural and electronic properties making them potentially suitable for diverse scientific and technological applications. The principal strategy employed is to use transition metal reagents and catalysts that has resulted (through the years) in the production of a wealth of important carbon-based products. In the present instance, efforts will be focussed towards making "analogous" but silicon-based materials by examining first the fundamental transformations of silicon species (e.g. silylene, SiR2; silenes, R2Si=SiR'2, etc..particularly LnM=SiR2 systems) at the metal centers, and subsequently by exploring the structures, bonding, and structure-reactivity relationships in these species. Professor Tilley has been a leader in developing synthetic methodologies in metal-silicon compounds. Efforts will also be expended towards targeting new pi-systems containing unsaturated silicon and germanium atoms in the hope that these new systems will provide some unusual electronic properties that might give way to conjugated macromolecules incorporating double bonds in silicon and germanium.
