Carbon-hydrogen bonds are ubiquitous in Nature, as well as in commodity chemicals derived from petroleum and renewable resources. Prior to the 21st century, most synthetic transformations of unactivated C–H bonds required harsh conditions, even though the first oxidative addition of a C–H bond to a transition metal center, reported by Chatt and Watson in 1962, occurred at room temperature. In this award address, an overview of our research in C–H bond functionalization at Michigan State University will be presented. The path to current iridium C–H borylation catalysts, whose selectivities can be tuned by manipulating steric and electronic effects through ligand design, will be traced from a 1995 publication, where the stoichiometric reaction between catecholborane and one C–H bond of ethylene bound to titanium resulted in substitution of the ethylene hydrogen by a catechol boryl group. Important experiments, including the role that quantum chemical calculations played in designing some of them, will be discussed, and recent results from our laboratories will be highlighted.

Award Address. (ACS Award in Organometallic Chemistry sponsored by Dow). C-H functionalizations enabled by boron reagents and transition metal complexes

Macromolecular Chemistry: The Second Century

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ACS Spring 2020 National Meeting & Expo

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.