February 2024
Prof. Eric. Jacobsen “lecture 1 : Catalysis: A Frontier at the Center of Chemistry”
Prof. Eric. Jacobsen Harvard University Abstract In the minds of chemists at least, there is no doubt that many of the most pressing challenges facing humanity – such as health, the environment, and energy – will have to be addressed using chemistry. Catalysis lies at the heart of nearly every challenge in modern chemistry, cutting across all of its subdisciplines and connecting to fields as diverse as biology, materials science, and engineering. However, chemists’ ability to design new catalysts for…
Find out more »Prof. Eric. Jacobsen “lecture 2 : Minding Mechanistic Misfits!”
Prof. Eric. Jacobsen Harvard University Abstract My research program has been dedicated to the discovery of catalytic systems that control stereochemical outcomes in organic reactions of interest. In the course of our efforts, we have had occasion to perform deep mechanistic analyses of the catalysts we have discovered. In this lecture, I will relate three different stories where seemingly minor misbehaviors in our experimental data were examined closely and found to reveal unexpected insights into the catalytic mechanisms and ultimately…
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