Synthetic, Mechanistic, and Catalytic Studies of Electrophilic d- and f-Element Complexes

通过这个奖项，美国国家科学基金会化学部的化学催化项目正在支持伊利诺斯州埃文斯顿西北大学的托宾·j·马克斯教授的研究。马克斯教授和他的同事们正在发现、理解和优化新的催化反应，并将这一努力与教育推广活动紧密结合起来。这种催化过程对美国化学工业非常重要，据估计，催化支撑着美国25%的GDP，大规模生产肥料、燃料、塑料、药品、涂料和其他化学品。未来的催化转化必须更高效、无毒、无污染，并以更具选择性、可持续性和经济竞争力的技术使用低成本、富含地球资源的金属。解决这些挑战将需要一支熟练的国家技术劳动力，而美国大学正在通过广泛教育年轻科学家来解决全球规模的问题，同时在广泛的学科前沿进行优秀的研究，从而发挥重要作用。该奖项资助的项目涉及多方面、教育上严格的催化剂创造、催化反应和对反应产物的理解。这与一个高度互动的研究小组环境相结合，为规划工业、国家实验室或学术生涯的研究生、本科生和博士后学者提供了出色的培训/指导，其中包括女性和代表性不足的少数民族。本研究围绕两个综合探索性、假设驱动的主题展开，这些主题是由地球上丰富的镧系元素（4f）、锕系元素（5f）和10种早期过渡金属配合物的独特性质激发的。首先，正在开发通过非传统途径产生或切割碳-杂元素键的催化反应。不同寻常的催化剂被用于选择性地生成杂原子（硼、氮、氧、硫、磷）键，这些键与烯烃、炔烃、酮、醛、酯和酰胺等重要的化学组成部分形成键，无论是单步还是紧密耦合的多步。具有不同环结构的有用物质，如药品和精细化学品，正在通过这项工作生产。正在研究的课题包括用于药物相关的对映选择性催化过程的手性配体，以及能够逆转上述成键过程以解构生物基原料和其他含杂原子分子的催化系统。在第二个主题中，研究了催化剂核效应在非常规烯烃聚合和加氢过程中的应用。该团队正在使用设计的催化中心来影响聚合反应，这些反应将不饱和构建块（包括那些通常失活的极性和碱性基）连接起来，以生产具有优异整体性能的塑料材料，包括机械或加工性能，和/或表面性能，如附着力、润湿性、拒水性、与其他聚合物的相容性或杀菌特性。催化剂设计包括协调协同酶样过程的方法，当两个催化中心被放置在接近但不同的距离时，这些过程被“打开”，以实现独特的聚合过程。这些包括聚合反应，产生新型聚合物结构，源自催化剂，其中两个协同金属中心具有相似或不同的互补反应性。这种催化剂的第二个目标是形成键的过程，这种过程只能通过两个催化金属中心的合作相互作用来产生扩展的结构。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

With this award, the Chemical Catalysis Program of the NSF Division of Chemistry is supporting the research of Professor Tobin J. Marks of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. Professor Marks and his coworkers are discovering, understanding, and optimizing new catalytic reactions, and closely combining this effort with educational outreach activities. Such catalytic processes are of great importance to the U.S. chemical industry, and it is estimated that catalysis underpins 25% of the U.S. GDP, producing fertilizers, fuels, plastics, pharmaceuticals, coatings, and other chemicals on a huge scale. Future catalytic transformations must be more efficient, non-toxic, non-polluting, and use low-cost, earth-abundant metals in more selective, sustainable, and economically competitive technologies. Addressing these challenges will require a skilled National technical workforce, and US universities are playing a major role by broadly educating young scientists to attack global-scale problems, while conducting excellent research across broad disciplinary fronts. Projects funded by this award involve a multi-faceted, educationally rigorous mix of catalyst creation, catalytic reactions, and understanding reaction products. This, combined with a highly interactive research group environment, provides excellent training/mentoring for graduate, undergraduate, and postdoctoral scholars planning industrial, national laboratory, or academic careers, and includes women and underrepresented minorities. This research is built around two integrated exploratory, hypothesis-driven themes stimulated by the unique properties of earth-abundant lanthanide (4f), actinide (5f), and d0 early transition metal complexes. In the first, catalytic reactions that create or cleave carbon-heteroelement bonds via non-traditional pathways are being developed. Unusual catalysts are being used to selectively create heteroatom (boron, nitrogen, oxygen, sulfur, phosphorus) bonds to important chemical building blocks such as olefins, alkynes, ketones, aldehydes, esters and amides, either in single or in closely coupled multiple steps. Useful substances with diverse ring structures such as pharmaceuticals and fine chemicals and being produced by this work. Topics being studied include chiral ligands for pharma-related enantioselective catalytic processes, and catalytic systems capable of reversing the aforementioned bond-forming processes to deconstruct bio-based feedstocks and other heteroatom-containing molecules. In the second theme, catalyst nuclearity effects applied to unusual olefin polymerization and hydroelementation processes are being studied. The team is using designed catalytic centers to effect polymerization reactions which link unsaturated building blocks, including those with normally deactivating polar and basic groups, to produce plastic materials with superior bulk properties including mechanical or processing properties, and/or surface properties such as adhesion, wettability, water-repellence, compatibility with other polymers, or bacteriocidal characteristics. Catalyst design includes ways to orchestrate cooperative enzyme-like processes that are "switched on" when two catalytic centers are placed in close but variable proximity with the objective of achieving unique polymerization processes. These include polymerization reactions to produce novel types of polymer architectures derived from catalysts in which two cooperating metal centers have similar or different, complementary reactivities. A second goal with such catalysts is bond-forming processes which create expanded structures accessible only by the cooperative interaction of two catalytic metal centers.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.