Guest Speaker – Inorganic (CHEM 754) – April 25, 2023

Bio
Matt Conley grew up in and around Chicago. He obtained a B.S. in Chemistry from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2004, and was introduced to research in Vladimir Gevorgyan's group. He joined Richard F. Jordan's group at the University of Chicago for his Ph. D. As a member of the Jordan group Matt studied the isomerization mechanisms of Pd(II) complexes. He pursued a postdoc at the ICIQ in Tarragona, Spain with Javier de Mendoza (2008 – 2011), where he worked on guanidinium receptors. In 2011 Matt moved to ETH in Zurich, Switzerland to work in Christophe Coperet's group as a postdoc. In the Copéret group he worked on surface organometallic chemistry to synthesize well-defined heterogeneous catalysts. He also worked on characterization of supported species and molecular organometallic complexes using solid-state NMR. In 2015, he joined the faculty at the University of California, Riverside and was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2021. Throughout all of his moves he remains a loyal fan of the Chicago Cubs.

Abstract
Generation of catalytically active sites on “inert” oxide supports is a robust industrially relevant methodology to generate heterogeneous catalysts that mediate many large-scale chemical processes. One of the most important, yet prosaic, features of some heterogeneous catalysts is the inability of active sites to “move” on the support, which generates reactive site-isolated active sites that can have higher activity or selectivity than related homogeneous catalysts. As chemists, how can we leverage this property in catalyst design? In this lecture I will describe immobilization of organometallic species onto functionalized surfaces as a method to understand relevant industrial models for common Ziegler-type olefin polymerization catalysts (e.g. Cp2ZrCl2/AlR3/oxide), generation of cationic tantalum hydride sites to digest polyethylene, and methods to more generally access cationic surface species.