Uncovering Cooperative Pathways in Asymmetric Catalysis

In the course of my group’s efforts to discover new asymmetric catalytic reactions, we have had occasion to perform deep mechanistic analyses of the catalysts we have discovered. In this lecture, I will relate different stories where seemingly minor “misbehaviors” in our experimental data were examined closely and found to lead to unexpected insights into the catalytic mechanisms and ultimately led us to improved or completely new catalytic systems. The common feature of each of these systems was ultimately found to be the operation of unanticipated cooperative mechanisms. The lecture will conclude with a discussion of our recent efforts to identify cooperative pathways through both hypothesis-driven and mechanistically agnostic approaches.

Speaker: Eric Jacobsen, Harvard University