Research Interests

Advisor

Inorganic Chemistry Research Interests

Dr. Barbara Burke

Polynuclear Transition - Metal Compounds: Trinuclear transition-metal compound such as basic iron acetate have been known since the late 1800's. Its structure is the following:

Many higher analogs of the basic iron acetate have been, and are, being prepared and studied. These compounds, which all contain iron-oxo bridges, are of interest because of their potential as model compounds for proteins such as ferritin, hemerythrin, ribonucleotide reductase and methane monooxygenase. First, however, the inorganic chemistry of these polynuclear iron compounds must be elucidated. At the present time, we are working on a spectroscopic analysis of the recently prepared "ferric wheel," a decairon molecule in which the alternating iron and oxygen atoms form a nearly perfect circle.

We will also be studying the formation and decomposition kinetics of "ferric wheel," its reactivity with a variety of ligands and begin synthesizing other analogues and derivatives. We will also begin looking at similar manganese compounds.

Hazardous Waste: We will apply inorganic chemistry to develop effective hazardous waste treatment methods which can be incorporated into the freshman laboratory experiments. Often relatively small amounts of hazardous waste are contained in large volumes of water. Our goal is to develop suitable methods to remove the offensive ions from aqueous solution and thereby significantly reduce the amount of hazardous waste. We have been working on experiment 009 (CHM 152) which generates large volumes of waste containing iron (III), manganese (II) and permanganate ions. We can remove these virtually completely from solution simply by adding excess sodium hydroxide:

Both inorganic and analytical principles and techniques are important in these types of studies. In the future we will be developing methods for waste reduction in other freshman laboratory experiments.

Dr. Joe Casalnuovo

Our research is focused on a class of compounds known as Fischer carbenes. Fischer carbenes are organometallic compounds that have been widely used as reagents in organic synthesis. Notably, they have been very useful in synthetic routes to natural products that have potential applications in medicinal research. In our laboratory, we have recently discovered the first efficient route to diphosphinated Fischer carbenes, a new and exciting variation of this class of compounds. We are interested in fully exploring the synthesis, characterization (IR and NMR spectroscopies), and reactivity of these novel compounds. We are especially interested in the potential of chiral diphosphinated Fischer carbenes to carry out asymmetric syntheses, a vital tool in the synthesis of natural products. Because many of the compounds that we synthesize decompose when exposed to air, researchers have the opportunity to learn how to carry out reactions in an airless environment using Schlenk glassware techniques.