Learning an old ‘dog’ some new tricks: Ligand-centered redox-catalysis
Dr. ir. Jarl Ivar van der Vlugt
Homogeneous, Bioinspired & Supramolecular Catalysis
University of Amsterdam
Traditionally, strategies for the design of homogeneous catalysts utilize metals as the locus of all reactivity. Recently, novel strategies have been introduced that enable metal-ligand bifunctional catalysis and ‘ligand redox catalysis’. The former involves direct participation of the ligand in bond-breaking and –making processes during substrate activation and turnover (‘reactive ligands’). The latter mainly focusses on strategies where the ligand displays redox-chemistry infers reactivity at the metal center or at the metal-bound substrate (‘redox-active ligands’). I will give a concise overview of the relevant advances for organometallic chemistry and catalysis.
We have introduced novel redox-active tridentate ligand designs that show fascinating reactivity in both mono- and multinuclear base and noble metal complexes. The potential of this approach will be sketched using selected examples on C-H amination, electrocatalytic C-X activation and azide activation by virtue of the redox-active ligand platforms.
Jarl Ivar van der Vlugt (1975) earned his PhD (with Vogt) at the Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) in 2003, working on ligand design and homogeneous catalysis, for which he received the 2004 KNCV Catalysis prize. After postdoctoral research at Univ. Illinois – Urbana-Champaign; with Rauchfuss) and Univ. Göttingen (with F. Meyer), as an Alexander-von-Humboldt Fellow, since late 2008 he is affiliated with the van ’t Hoff Institute for Molecular Sciences at the University of Amsterdam (UvA), currently as associate professor. His scientific interests are in designing and exploiting ligand-centered designs and new strategies for small molecule activation, hydroaddition reactions and catalysis for green energy applications.