Organometallic Chemistry of the Nonmetals: Unlocking New Approaches to Green Catalysis

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Our research and training program will study new chemistry of the main group elements to turn them into potent and sustainable catalysts for bulk and fine chemical synthesis. One of the great challenges of chemistry in the 21st century is the development of sustainable approaches to the production of chemicals. Catalysis, a concept reckoned as one of the pillars of green chemistry, is currently used by most sectors of the chemical industry in order to provide society with the variety of value-added products it requires. Unfortunately, despite the advantages of catalysis in term of sustainability, the fact that modern catalysts typically rely on transition metals (TMs) in their active site comes with important disadvantage. Indeed, precious transitions metals - elements that are costly, rare in Canada and difficult to extract from natural resources - have the best-developed catalytic chemistry of all the elements of the periodic table. The high price, toxicity and environmentally challenging extraction of TMs is an important limitation in the sustainability and applicability of catalysis. Because they lack the intrinsic reactivity of TMs, the main group elements (MGEs) have long been neglected in catalytic research. MGEs typically lack the redox flexibility and advantageous combination of vacant and filled orbitals that make the TMs ideally suited for catalysis. Our program will find strategies to at the same time address these perceived deficiencies of MGEs and to use their unique characteristics to develop ground-breaking sustainable catalysts for a wide range of applications. Our program has a two-pronged vision: we will not only tackle application-motivated problems by developing metal-free catalysts for industrially-important reactions, but also take a leading role in the fundamental scientific investigation of the chemistry of MGEs and challenge some traditional assumptions regarding their reactivity. Our long term vision is to make MGE part of the mainstream of catalysis. To reach our goals, we will use a rational design approach and build an expertise in predictive computational modelling for all members of the group. With this training, the team will tackle three initial objectives: - To explore the redox-based reactivity of elusive oxidation state of MGEs by developing stable-yet-reactive mono-coordinated complexes. - To develop a new class of carbenes that display complementary s-acidic and p-basic properties to mimic the orbital arrangement of TMs . - To develop MGE catalysts for olefin metathesis compatible with fluorinated olefins. This mixture of ground-breaking advancement of knowledge, of promising green applications, and of state-of-the-art training of HQP will be of great benefit to the Canadian leadership in science and society. Specifically, the industrial interest for green technologies and catalysis that come at a low cost will make scientists trained in the design of MGE-based catalysts a sought-after type of HQP.