Elon Ison Wins NSF Career Award

CENTC investigator Dr. Elon Ison, assistant professor of chemistry at North Carolina State University, received an Early Career Development Award from the National Science Foundation. The award is one of NSF’s highest honors for early-career science and engineering faculty.

Ison’s five-year, $530,000 grant will fund research related to his proposal, titled Rational Design of Green Catalysts for Chemical Oxidations. His goal is to develop chemical methods that reduce waste and environmentally hazardous materials and could potentially lead to more efficient use of chemical and natural resources, such as oil, coal, natural gas and biomass, to generate energy.

CENTC researchers find gases react inside single crystals

A newly synthesized family of molecular single crystals has two remarkable capabilities, reported in this week's Nature by CENTC researchers Prof. Maurice Brookhart (Univ. Of North Carolina) and graduate student Zheng Huang (now a post-doctoral fellow at Univ. Of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign). Members of the molecular family can exchange small gaseous ligands for others, while retaining their integrity as single crystals; and some of the family members can act as selective catalysts for the hydrogenation of ethylene gas.
Maurice Brookhart and colleagues synthesized an organometallic compound, [Ir]-N₂, in which a reactive iridium atom, supported by an organic 'pincer' ligand, binds a nitrogen molecule. Crystallizing this compound from a toluene solution yields single crystals, in which the [Ir]-N₂ molecules are stacked around channels containing toluene molecules.

Exposing the [Ir]-N₂ crystals to other small-molecule gases, such as carbon monoxide, ammonia or ethylene, results in solid-state transformations to analogous compounds in which each of these gases replaces nitrogen. The authors show that these transformations take place by direct exchange reactions inside the intact crystals, rather than by ligand loss followed by uptake. The gaseous ligands evidently enter the crystals via the toluene-containing channels, which exclude entry by all but the smallest molecules.

Three of the compounds also function as hydrogenation catalysts for ethylene and propylene, with a strong selectivity for the smaller gas when reactions are prevented from occurring at or near the crystal surfaces. This appears to be the first demonstration of a selective catalytic reaction occurring inside an organometallic crystal.

Read the full article: Huang, Z.; White, P. S.; Brookhart, M. “Ligand Exchanges and Selective Catalytic Hydrogenation in Molecular Single Crystals”, Nature, 2010, 465, 598-601.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature09085

2010 CENTC Summer School Accepting Applications

CENTC is sponsoring a summer school to be held July 19-22, 2010 at the University of Washington in Seattle. The four-day in-residence summer school program will emphasize purposes, techniques, challenges and career opportunities in catalysis as the 21st century progresses. Advanced Ph.D. students, post-doctoral fellows, early-career researchers and faculty members from primarily undergraduate institutions who are interested in deepening their understanding of organometallic catalysis are encouraged to apply.

To learn more, visit the Summer School website.

Diverse Backgrounds, Common Goals Social at ACS National Meeting

CENTC, Procter & Gamble, Dow and UOP are co-hosting the second Diverse Backgrounds, Common Goals event at the National ACS meeting in San Francisco on Monday, March 22, 2010 from 5:30 - 7:30 pm. This open social event is being organized by CENTC and American Competitiveness in Chemistry postdoctoral fellow, Dr. Takiya Ahmed, with the goals of fostering integration and partnerships among national science organizations interested in diversity and between those organizations and industry, and to provide networking opportunities for undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral students.

Stop by the Moscone Convention Center room 2011 any time between 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm on Monday, March 23rd for complimentary refreshments and lots of mingling.

CENTC congratulates recent graduates

The Center for Enabling New Technologies through Catalysis extends congratulations to two recent graduates:

Chris Waidmann was a graduate student with Prof. James Mayer at the University of Washington. Chris’ dissertation title is "Investigating Proton Coupled Electron Transfers in Oxovanadium and Dimeric Copper-Oxo Systems: The Importance of Intrinsic Barriers and Reaction Driving Force".

Sabuj Kundu, a graduate student at Rutgers University with Prof. Alan Goldman, wrote his thesis on “Reactions of (PCP)Ir Complexes With Small Molecules”.

Congratulations CENTC graduates!

Three CENTC investigators elected as AAAS Fellows

CENTC investigators R. Thomas Baker (Univ. of Ottawa), William Jones (Univ. of Rochester) and Huimin Zhao (Univ. of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign) have been elected as Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. AAAS recognizes Fellows for their contributions to science and technology.

Read the press release and full list of elected Fellows.

New AAAS Fellows Baker, Jones and Zhao