Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

85% of all chemicals are produced with the help of small additives called catalysts. In fact, catalysis accounts for >25% GDP of industrialised countries, but most of it is performed by the late transition metals that are expensive and often toxic. This it is why there is a significant current push to replace these catalysts with those based on cheaper and more benign main-group elements. Our proposal addresses both the practical and fundamental aspects of this field. First, based on a recent discovery in our previous NSERC-funded research, we shall develop a new practical selective C-C coupling of unsaturated substrates that will pave the way to a big library of products that are difficult to prepare by the current methods. Second, based on our other recent discovery, we shall study C-H bond activation on transient metal oxides and imides and shall investigate the possibility of closing a catalytic cycle for C-C bond formations. The C-C and C-H bond breaking and making are among the hottest areas of the contemporary chemistry that bring many new exciting opportunities. On a more academic side, we shall prepare several new families of low-valent (highly reduced) main-group compounds and study the fundamentals of their chemistry, in particular bond activations and couplings. This is a flourishing area of research that is a lasting source of new exciting discoveries forming basis for future more efficient and benign manufacturing processes.