In this project funded by the Chemical Catalysis Program of the Chemistry Division, Professor Karen I. Goldberg of the University of Washington will develop detailed mechanistic understanding of fundamental organometallic reactions that can selectively cleave carbon-hydrogen bonds, can activate molecular oxygen to enable its use as a selective oxidant, and can selectively produce functionalized organic products through the formation of new carbon-carbon and carbon-oxygen bonds. These reactions are vital to study and understand because they can be applied to the manufacturing of chemicals and materials that are essential to our society - from plastics and building supplies, to new agricultural products and pharmaceuticals. Many of these chemicals are produced on huge scales. But the current processes are complex, consume large amounts of energy and/or produce significant waste. Professor Goldberg's efforts may enable chemists to conduct the reactions more quickly and selectively using less energy, using less dangerous reagents, and producing fewer by-products. The broader impacts involve outreach to high school students, teachers, and the general public as well as training of undergraduate and graduate student researchers.
This work will enhance our fundamental understanding about catalytic processes. There is a substantial need for more efficient ways of making bulk chemicals from petroleum-based products. In addition, being able to activate and selectively transform C-H bonds in alkanes could significantly impact our dependence on oil by providing new routes to efficiently transport and utilize natural gas reserves.
Transition metal catalysts are widely used in the industrial production of fuels, chemicals, and pharmaceuticals. Development and implementation of new catalysts will have significant societal benefits, including the use of less energy, the use of cheaper and/or more readily available feedstocks and the use of less noxious reagents. Efficient new processes will also result in fewer byproducts, which will decrease purification costs and waste streams. Because of these significant rewards, the development of new catalytic processes continues to be a high priority research focus in academic and industrial laboratories. This award supported research to further our understanding of how metal complexes bearing organic groups react. The goal is to develop catalysts that could transform current operating procedures in the chemical industry. In particular, the researchers concentrated their efforts on learning how transition metals activate and cleave C-H bonds, ubiquitous in hydrocarbons, and in understanding how oxygen from the air could be used in transition metal catalyzed reactions. Being able to selectively cleave C-H bonds would enable the industry to use a host of previously unreactive and widely available chemicals as substrates for reactions to produce valuable chemicals. For large-scale oxidation reactions, oxygen is the optimal oxidant choice; it is inexpensive, abundantly available and environmentally benign. Yet efforts to use oxygen in selective oxidation catalyzed by transition metal complexes have been stymied by an incomplete understanding of how oxygen reacts with metal complexes. Through this award, we have discovered, studied and elucidated the mechanisms of a variety of new reactions that break and make C-H, C-C and C-O bonds and have learned a significant amount about how O2 reacts with transition metal complexes. Our results have been reported through peer-reviewed scientific publications and at conferences to inform the scientific community at large about these developments. This award supported the research training of 6 graduate students and 2 undergraduates in an inclusive and respectful environment. All students received training in laboratory safety, proper laboratory techniques, usage of laboratory equipment and instrumentation, scientific reasoning skills, critical evaluation of the experiments and results, and scientific communication methods, both oral and written. Students supported by this award published their work in scientific journals and in theses. Many also had the opportunity to present at important scientific conferences and even had their presentations recognized with opportunities to present orally to the entire conference. Graduate students who earned their degrees while supported by this award are now gainfully employed. Researchers supported by this award participated in outreach in Seattle public high schools and at a local science museum. The high school program involves a series of presentations, classroom discussions, videos, interactive demonstrations and a hands-on laboratory experiment emphasizing energy and catalysis. The high school students are not only exposed to science research on problems relevant to their daily lives but also learn through interactions with GS that scientists come from a range of diverse ethnic, racial and economic backgrounds and that a career in science can be accessible to everyone, including each of them. At "Paws on Science" at the Pacific Science Center, researchers explained catalysis and chemical reactions to children and adults with fun hands-on activities. Many adult visitors were surprised to learn that so many of the chemicals in their daily lives (e.g. detergents, plastics, pesticides, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, etc.) are currently derived from crude oil.
