CAREER: Elucidating Electronic Structure-Reactivity Principles in Base-Metal Catalysis

In this CAREER project, Professor Yuyang Dong of the Department of Chemistry at Colorado State University is developing a series of square-planar base-metal complexes to understand how their electronic structures control catalytic performance. The goal of this research is to use these structure-reactivity relationships to guide the development of base-metal catalytic processes to reduce the reliance on rare and costly precious metals. By establishing these design principles, the project could lead to the next-generation catalysts for the advanced manufacturing of pharmaceuticals, agrochemicals, and novel materials. The project lies at the interface of synthetic organic chemistry, inorganic chemistry, and catalysis, making it well-suited to provide high-level education and training for scientists at multiple career stages. Integrated educational activities will engage local high school students, expand access to advanced inorganic chemistry education through community-college partnerships, and share research-inspired learning modules to make the problem-solving process behind modern synthetic chemistry more accessible to a broader audience. This project could establish electronic structure-reactivity relationships across a series of high-spin catalytic intermediates. The central advance is the use of weak-field pincer ligands to stabilize and characterize highly reactive open-shell species that are typically too short-lived to observe. These include metal-ligand multiply bonded complexes involved in group-transfer catalysis, open-shell metal-boryl compounds relevant to radical borylation, and high-spin metal-alkyl intermediates proposed in olefin functionalization. By isolating these complexes and correlating their spin states, frontier orbitals, redox properties, and ligand-field environments with stoichiometric and catalytic reactivity, this project could define the core principles to control challenging single-electron processes. These insights are expected to accelerate the development of more selective, efficient, and sustainable catalytic methods for the advanced manufacturing of pharmaceuticals, agrochemicals, and novel materials. 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. NSF Award ID: 2541001 | Program: 01002627DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT | Principal Investigator: Yuyang Dong | Institution: Colorado State University, FORT COLLINS, CO | Award Amount: $737,138 View on NSF Award Search: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/show-award/?AWD_ID=2541001 View on Research.gov: https://www.research.gov/awardapi-service/v1/awards/2541001.html