Students interested in joining the lab should visit this page.
Our research aims to develop new organic reactions and synthetic strategies for preparation of small organic molecules. The molecules we make are used as agrochemicals as well as probes that help us answer questions in molecular biology.
Currently we have two main research project underway
This project explores use of gold complexes as catalysts for a efficient addition of nucleophiles to the C–C pi bond in alkynes. Our recent publications focused on synthesis of benzothiophenes and benzofurans. More recently we are focusing on green chemistry aspects of this methodology. Some of the questions that guide our efforts are:
The free radical reaction of molecular oxygen with weak C–H bonds that leads to hydroperoxides (ROOH), known as autoxidation to chemists and peroxidation to biochemists, is the key reaction that leads to oxidative degradation of hydrocarbon-rich materials. Knowledge of rate constants of autoxidation is key in development of antioxidants, molecules that trap the chain-propagating peroxyl radical and inhibit or terminate autoxidation. Use of peroxyl radical clocks is currently the leading experimental approach used in determination of rate constants of H-atom transfer from substrate to peroxyl radical. The main limitation of peroxyl radical clocks developed to date is that they rely exclusively on chromatography-based analytical tools where resolution of analytes depends on a variety of instrument-specific factors (adsorbent, mobile phase, detector, analyte volatility, UV absorption, etc.). In recent years quantitative NMR (qNMR) spectroscopy has emerged as an attractive analytical method due to the fact that it is simple to adopt and is non-destructive to the sample. The aim of this project is to develop a peroxyl radical clock method that uses quantitative heteronuclear NMR for compound analysis.