Join Yale Chemistry for a Silliman Inorganic Chemistry Seminar with Patrick Melvin, Assistant Professor of Chemistry, Bryn Mawr College.
Title: Fluorination on the Undergraduate Timescale: Reagent Development at a Primarily Undergraduate Institution (PUI)
Fluorine has quickly grown to become a highly prized element in drug design, often appearing in multiple places in some of the most prominent and successful pharmaceuticals. Deoxyfluorination is one of the most common strategies for fluorine incorporation but, while improvements have been made, limitations still plague this methodology, such as sluggish reaction rates and harsh reagents. Our laboratory has recently developed a new class of sulfur molecule, sulfone iminium fluorides (SIFs), that were designed to address many of these limitations. When used with aliphatic alcohols or carboxylic acids, sulfone iminium fluorides generate excellent yields of alkyl and acyl fluorides in just 60 seconds, by far the shortest deoxyfluorination reaction times to date. This enhanced reactivity is not limited to the creation of carbon – fluoride bonds either; phosphinic fluorides can be rapidly generated in high yields at room temperature from the corresponding phosphinic acid. The SIF reagents are also useful in synthetic methodologies beyond deoxyfluorination, including sulfur fluoride exchange (SuFEx) and in the Beckmann rearrangement. The talk will conclude with a discussion of research at primarily undergraduate institutions (PUIs) and how they differ from major research universities.
Date: October 16, 2023
Time: 12 pm
Location: SCL 160
This seminar is generously sponsored by the Mrs. Hepsa Ely Silliman Memorial Fund