This NSF Young Investigator Award in the Inorganic, Bioinorganic, and Organometallic Program will support research on transition metal compounds with heteroatoms by Dr. John F. Hartwig of the Chemistry Department, Yale University. The goal of the research is to bring the catalytic effectiveness and stability of organometallic compounds to new areas of chemistry. Organometallic compounds contain metal-carbon bonds; here new species which also contain metal-boron bonds will be synthesized and studied for their potential as catalysts and as starting materials for new materials. Tungsten, niobium, iron, ruthenium, iridium and gallium compounds will be prepred and emphasis will be placed on catalysis of reactions of alkenes. In addition, catalytic metal-mediated coupling of carbon and nitrogen and of carbon and oxygen will be studied. Work on metal-nitrogen systems will also involve use of organometallic compounds with peptides and DNA in which photolytic cleavage of the metal-nitrogen bond will aid in the identification of intramolecular protein folding processes and other protein-protein or protein-DNA associations.
