CAREER: Atom Transfer Radical Addition and Cyclization Reactions in the Presence of Catalytic Amounts of Copper Complexes

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This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5). In this CAREER project funded by the Inorganic, Bioinorganic, and Organometallic Chemistry Program of the Chemistry Division, Tomislav Pintauer of Duquesne University will carry out research to develop new catalysts for organic transformations involving free radical intermediates. Pintauer will study how to couple metal complexes that are highly active for halogen atom transfer with reducing agents that can regenerate the starting complex. In this manner a single metal complex can potentially catalyze hundreds of thousands of addition or cyclization reactions per use. The educational plan focuses on a few important items including broadening the undergraduate and graduate curriculum at Duquesne University to include information about catalysis science, developing summer minicourses on x-ray crystallography and NMR methods for metal complexes (available to the Pittsburgh higher education community), and mentoring minority high school students.Besides developing new methodologies, the proposed research will transform catalytic atom transfer reactions from ones that generate large amounts of metal waste and impurities into ones that can function effectively at parts per million levels of metal catalysts. Additionally, the proposed research could take its field to the next level of study, where more advanced methods such as chemoselective and stereoselective catalytic atom transfer radical additions and cyclizations could be discovered. This work has the potential for high impact and should provide significant benefits for the medicinal chemistry field and for the pharmaceutical industry.