报告题目：Computer Assisted Design of New Catalytic Reactions: Catalytic Borylation of Methane and Other Reactions

报 告 人 ：Prof. Mu-Hyun Baik

报告时间：2018年3月15日（周四）上午10:00

报告地点：化学楼一号会议室

邀 请 人：廖荣臻教授

报告人简介：

Mu-Hyun Baik obtained his B. Sc. at Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf in 1994 and his Ph. D. at Univ. of North Carolina Chapel Hill in 2000. After a three year postdoc. at Columbia University, he joined Indiana University as an assistant professor and was promoted to and tenured Associate Professor. In 2015, he moved to Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) as an associative director. He has published over 100 papers in international journals, including Science, Nat. Chem., Angew. Chem. Int. Ed., and J. Am. Chem. Soc. Among the awards and honors He received, he won Indiana University Outstanding Junior Faculty Award (2007), NSF–CAREER Award (2007), KAIST Top-10 Research Achievement Award (2017).

报告摘要：

Computational molecular modeling has become a standard tool of mechanistic inquiry in the last decade. When combined with traditional experimental techniques, theoretical studies can be extremely powerful and deliver a detailed understanding of complex reactions and in some cases, be used as a predictive tool. In this talk, I will highlight three examples of such integrated studies where very challenging catalytic C–H activation reactions were thoroughly investigated. Nature has chosen to use iron to design a catalyst, methane monooxygenase, for the conversion of methane into biomass in methanotrophic bacteria. In synthetic organic chemistry, iridium is a metal of choice for developing a high-performance catalyst. And recently, we were able to show that titanium can be used to catalytically dehydrogenate alkanes. In all cases, C–H bonds that are very difficult to activate are broken at very mild conditions. In this presentation, I will highlight how different features of the metal-complexes are being utilized to accomplish these challenging transformations.