Earth Abundant Metal-Doped Covalent Organic Frameworks for Heterogeneous Catalysis

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Developing sustainable catalysts is an important research subject in chemistry. Sustainable catalysts speed up the conversion of raw materials to valuable chemicals while they improve the safety of chemical reactions and minimize negative impacts to the environment. In this project, Professor Psaras McGrier of The Ohio State University (OSU) is preparing sustainable catalysts using an advanced class of crystalline porous polymers. These catalysts are used to convert plant materials (biomass) to chemical fuels as well as to remove sulfur from petroleum feedstocks to minimize the emission of pollution-causing by-products. Professor McGrier is utilizing several education and outreach programs at OSU to help increase the participation of young, underrepresented minorities in the STEM fields. These activities include participation in the Breakfast of Science Champions (BoSC), an OSU program that allows underrepresented middle school students from Columbus City Schools the opportunity to visit and learn more about various cutting edge research projects. Professor McGrier is also organizing a research internship program for high school students from Columbus, OH.In this project funded by the Chemical Catalysis program of the Chemistry Division, Professor Psaras McGrier of The Ohio State University (OSU) is developing sustainable catalysts that perform cross-coupling reactions and activate inert carbon-heteroatom bonds using covalent organic frameworks (COFs). Benzobisoxazole (BBO)-linked COF-based catalysts that contain triangularly-shaped, pi-electron conjugated, dehydrobenzoannulene (DBA) metal sites are being studied. The goal is to obtain BBO-COFs that can be utilized to activate inert carbon-oxygen (C-O) and carbon-sulfur (C-S) bonds. The activation of aryl C-O bonds offers an opportunity to not only use aryl ethers to improve the atom-efficiency and safety of orthogonal cross-coupling reactions, but also to convert lignin-based biomass to deoxygenated chemical fuels. The activation and reduction of C-S bonds is useful for the desulfurization of petroleum feedstocks to minimize the emission of harmful sulfur oxide by-products. This proposal includes several education and outreach programs to help increase the participation of young underrepresented minorities in the STEM fields. These activities include the participation in the Breakfast of Science Champions (BoSC), an OSU STEM program that allows underrepresented middle school students from Columbus City Schools the opportunity to visit and learn more about various cutting edge research projects. Professor McGrier also organizes a research internship program for high school students from Columbus, OH.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.