Ramesh Giri
Pennsylvania State University, PA·Chemistry
Many medicines are built around a core of carbon atoms joined in specific patterns, and making those cores efficiently is a central challenge in chemistry. One powerful shortcut is to add two carbon pieces across a carbon-carbon double bond, found in molecules called alkenes, forming two new carbon-carbon bonds in a single step.
- Fields
Chemistry
- Topics
alkene difunctionalization
dicarbofunctionalization
unactivated alkenes
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through May 2029
What they work on
- Develop transition-metal-catalyzed difunctionalization of alkenes bearing simple functional groups, using a dual ligand system of electron-deficient alkenes and organic nitriles to stabilize intermediates and promote C(sp3)–C(sp3) bond formation.
- Develop photoredox catalysis using light-excited dioxygen and catalytic iodine to add two carbon groups across alkenes lacking coordinating groups, including forming strained cyclopropane rings.
- Create enantioselective versions of these alkene dicarbofunctionalization reactions, which yield a single mirror-image product, by designing TADDOL-phosphoramidite, PyOx and BOX chiral ligands.
More about the research
This is hard for simple "unactivated" alkenes. They react sluggishly, and the reactive intermediate formed after the first carbon is added tends to fall apart before the second can be attached.
Why it matters
Faster, shorter routes to complex carbon frameworks could make it cheaper and simpler to build molecular motifs found in pharmaceuticals, bioactive molecules and drug targets. Chemists in drug discovery and synthesis could use these one-step, two-bond-forming reactions to construct molecules that other methods cannot easily reach.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Xiaodong Shi
University of Maryland, MD·Chemistry
Optimize triazole-ruthenium carbene (TA-Ru) catalysts, whose triazole ligands improve heat stability, for olefin metathesis reactions that previous catalysts handled poorly, including high-temperature transformations.
Mark Biscoe
CUNY City College, NY·Chemistry
Develop palladium- and copper-catalyzed cross-coupling reactions that transfer handedness from enantioenriched secondary alkylboron reagents to new carbon centers with predictable retention or inversion.
Aaron Aponick
University of Georgia, GA·Chemistry
Identify Pd(II)-StackPhos catalysts, palladium paired with a chiral imidazole-based biaryl ligand, that give high mirror-image selectivity in alkene 1,2-difunctionalization for both syn- and anti-addition.
The school
Pennsylvania State University: 60 labs on PI Pages, $1.3B a year on research, 743 research doctorates a year.
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