My adventures with chemical warfare agents began in 1996 as a new postdoctoral associate in the Cramer group. Over the next two decades, my work on solvolysis of organophosphorus chemical warfare agents continued as I struck out on my own academic career. This talk will focus on unpublished results obtained by many undergraduate research students over those years, with an emphasis on the destruction of VX with comparison to our earlier published work. Work presented here summarizes independent research projects proposed and executed by undergraduate students and spans topics from reaction with alpha nucleophiles and Grignard reagents to redox chemistry, explored via traditional Born-Oppenheimer DFT calculations and atom-centered density matrix propagation (ADMP) dynamics. We will also explore a most unusual connection between P-S bond cleavage in VX and the supermodel Kate Moss, as well as how one may use pasta in place of poker chips. All this work traces its origins to my time in the Cramer group. Chris’s legacy lives on through those he has mentored as well as those that we mentees have mentored in turn.

Adventures with VX, Kate Moss and pasta: Legacies of Christopher J. Cramer

ACS Spring 2022

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