Virginia Montiel-Palma
Mississippi State University, MS·Chemistry·Early-career
Catalysts make chemical reactions easier, faster and cheaper, and two stubborn industrial problems drive this group's chemistry: stripping nitrogen out of fuel components and attaching silicon to molecules in a way that survives industrial use. The shared strategy is to design metal-containing molecules whose structure is tuned for one difficult bond-breaking or bond-forming step, then to study in detail how each catalyst works so the next generation can be improved.
- Fields
Chemistry
Materials Science
- Topics
catalysis
organometallic chemistry
heterobimetallic complexes
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Jun 2027
What they work on
- Design heterobimetallic complexes combining a late transition metal with a group-13 metal that bind nitrogen-containing aromatic compounds and cleave their carbon–nitrogen bonds at low hydrogen pressure.
- Determine how the metals' coordination modes control the hydrogenolysis reaction and establish its mechanism, using a multifaceted characterization plan together with computational methods.
- Graft transition metal complexes bearing silicon-, germanium- or tin-substituted phosphine ligands onto metal-organic frameworks to create robust supported catalysts for dehydrosilylation of alkenes.
- Tune the pincer-like ligand sites and the MOF pore size, chemistry and stability, and interrogate the dehydrosilylation mechanism to guide iterative development of more active and durable catalysts.
More about the research
Graduate and undergraduate students carry out synthetic, mechanistic and computational work on both projects.
Why it matters
Catalysts that cleave carbon–nitrogen bonds at low hydrogen pressure could make petroleum refining less energy-intensive while removing nitrogen compounds with environmental and health impacts from gasoline. Durable, supported silicon-adding catalysts could lower the cost of making building blocks for pharmaceuticals, medical and dental implants, and common materials.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
CAREER: Heterobimetallic Complexes for Facile Hydrodenitrogenation Processes with Low Hydrogen Intake
NSF · Jul 2022 – Jun 2027
Highly Robust Transition Metal Complexes with E-Substituted Phosphines (E = Si, Ge, Sn) Grafted onto Metal-Organic Frameworks for Dehydrogenative Functionalization
NSF · May 2021 – Apr 2027
Closest labs
Christopher Graves
Swarthmore College, PA·Chemistry
Synthesize group 13 metal complexes (boron, aluminum, gallium, indium) of tripodal nitroxide ligands, (RTriNOx3–)M, with systematically varied electron-donating and electron-withdrawing substituents.
T Don Tilley
University of California-Berkeley, CA·Chemistry
Develop high-yield [2+2+n] cycloaddition reactions that add several fused aromatic rings in one step, giving scalable access to large, tailored polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs).
John Anderson
University of Chicago, IL·Chemistry
Use metal oxo complexes that can be made highly basic to test how separate proton- and electron-transfer driving forces control concerted proton-electron transfer during C–H bond oxidation.
The school
Mississippi State University: 9 labs on PI Pages, $342M a year on research, 168 research doctorates a year.
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