New approaches and strategies in main group catalysis

Main group catalysis has received recent attention as a metal-free, cost-efficient complement to traditional transition metal catalysis. This huge potential for growth has been fueled by recent reports demonstrating application to challenging substrates, unique reactivity modes, properties, and transformations achievable by main group catalysts. In this webinar, leading chemists will discuss their latest research into a wide range of metal-free catalytic systems as well as barriers to entry, current trends, and future outlooks. Bertrand is a distinguished professor and director of the UCSD/CNRS Joint Research Chemistry Laboratory at UC San Diego. His research focuses on taming reactive carbenes, nitrenes, and diradicals and transforming these compounds into synthetically useful tools. He is a member of the French Academy of Sciences and, among other awards, received the ACS award for Inorganic Chemistry and the Sir Geoffrey Wilkinson Award of the RSC. Chiu earned her PhD at Texas A&M University, then worked at University Würzburg as an Alexander von Humboldt postdoctoral fellow. In 2010 she joined National Taiwan University where she is currently an Associate Professor focusing on the synthesis and catalytic application of cationic group 13 and 14 compounds. Hevia is a professor in Inorganic Chemistry at University of Bern. Her research includes incorporating the cooperative effects of polar organometallic reagents for key organic transformations as well as developing s-block based metal catalysis. Her work has been recognized with several awards including the 2021 GDCh Arfvedson-Schlenk Prize for her contributions to organolithium chemistry. Radosevich earned his PhD from UC Berkeley and completed an NIH postdoctoral fellowship at MIT. He then joined faculty at Pennsylvania State University before returning to MIT as an associate professor. His research focuses on designing new chemical reactions at the interface of inorganic and organic chemistry.