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Department of Chemistry • MIT
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The ability to construct organic molecules in a general and efficient manner has challenged the organic chemist since the beginning of the field. In today's environment there is a great need for selective, general, and efficient techniques to assemble organic molecules for a variety of different purposes from nanotechnology and new materials to biologically active molecules and pharmaceutical agents. Our research group has a long-standing interest in the development of new chemistry, including new chemical reactions that can be studied from a variety of viewpoints encompassing the fields of organic synthesis, physical organic chemistry, and organometallic chemistry.
Research topics under investigation in our laboratories include:
- Enantioselective Reduction
- Carbon-Carbon Bond-Forming Reactions
- Carbon-Heteroatom Bond-Forming Processes
- The Design and Utilization of New Ligands
- Applications in Total Synthesis
Once a new process of interest is discovered, we attempt to understand both the controlling features of the chemistry as well as the mechanistic details. We then pursue further development of the chemistry to render the new method useful to other synthetic chemists. At the same time, we seek out and conduct studies on applications of the new method. While the fundamental chemistry is our first concern, we devote a lot of effort to making our methods practical to increase their use by the widest variety of researchers possible. In fact, a hallmark of our work has been the development of chemistry that is both general and useful enough to be applied by others, not just by members of our own research group.
In recent years we have developed a number of methods that enable synthetic chemists to assemble small molecules in novel ways. Through the discovery of a new class of ligands for palladium-catalyzed methods, we have arrived at excellent catalysts for carbon-nitrogen and carbon-oxygen bond formation, for Suzuki coupling and for the arylation and vinylation of stablized enolates. Further, we have developed copper-catalyzed methods for asymmetric conjugate reduction as well as for carbon-nitrogen and carbon-oxygen bond forming reactions. We continue to examine these and related processes as well as search for new and useful transformations with which to develop the next generation of synthetic methods.
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