The second in a series on teaching advanced topics to undergraduates, the SLiThEr focuses on organoMetallic chemistry. While the primary framework for the discussion is my senior level course, there is plenty of great content from the live participants.
This collection of learning objects was created to celebrate the National ACS Award Winners 2023 who are members of the Division of Inorganic Chemistry. The list of award winners is shown below.
One thousand interactive organometallic and coordination complexes have been selected and prepared for practice and discovery in electron counting problems. The structures can be displayed and manipulated without requiring software installation using a web browser with JavaScript and JSmol.
This paper describes the use of a catalytic nickel system for the hydrodefluorination of aryl amides. While organofluorine compounds are extremely useful because of their unique properties, there are growing concerns about the impact of these compounds on the environment. Carbon-fluorine bonds are extremely strong, and so getting them to react is a significant challenge for chemists.
This paper describes work from the Milstein group in which ruthenium catalysts with pincer ligands are used to depolymerize nylons by breaking the C-N bond and hydrogenating the resulting products to amines and alcohols. Waste plastic is a serious environmental concern that needs a solution. Organometallic chemists put significant effort into finding ways to convert monomers into polymers, and now we must figure out ways to do the reverse.
This literature discussion was created to accompany the coordination chemistry chapter of a foundation-level inorganic course. It introduces the concept of cyclopentadienyl (Cp) ring slippage as a mechanism for ligand substitution.
This LO is a literature discussion based on one figure in Chan et. al.
This 1FLO focuses on the fundamentals of catalysis and the interpretation of catalytic data. The questions guide students through the definition of catalysts, turnover frequency, turnover number, and require the students to extract information from a table of catalytic data. The data set comes from the unprecedented activity of carba-closo-dodecaborate ligated gold catalysts in hydroamination reported by Lavallo and coworkers in 2013 (Lavallo, V.; Wright II, J. H.; Tham, F. S.; Quinlivan, S. Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2013, 52, 3172.
The second cohort of VIPEr fellows pulled together learning objects that they've used and liked or want to try the next time they teach their inorganic courses.
This LO was developed in 2022 as part of a collection celebrating the “Out in Inorganic Chemistry: A Celebration of LGBTQIAPN+ Inorganic Chemists” Inorganic Chemistry special issue. Check out the editorial and issue here: Editorial Special Issue
The questions below refer to the following 2020 publication by Dr. Jonathan Kuo and Dr. Karen Goldberg