ChemSemBlog

On Thursday October 8, 2009, Sean Reed a graduate student at Illinois University in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois.  The topic that he presented at this seminar was a lot of synthesis.  I had a little bit of a hard time picking up on everything, however, Sean Reed was extremely knowledgeable about his topic.  However, it was very interesting to learn about how Sean Reed and his professors are trying to develop new ways of synthesizing complex molecules and making them happen in shorter steps in order to use them more effectively.  So with these allylic molecules that are readily available in nature, Reed and his professor Christina White are working on various pharmaceutical applications.

So far it has taken him 3 years to discover the information that he has collected on this topic of allylic C-H amination.  Sean Reed and his group of researchers used many different products that was purchased from the chemical store.  The reason for purchasing it there is because it is easier to use an already developed material rather then having to create your own. To get the C-H amination Sean Reed said that the average procedure length can be as little as 8 hrs or as much as 72 hrs.  Now the major goal is to find ways to make the desired product in the shortest amount of time with the fewest steps  and that has the greatest yield.  So far they have shown a lot of new insights that can be found in the releases by the University of Illinois for 6-deoxyerythronolide B and the University of Illinois has also released many other articles on similar topics.

Sean Reed was a very nice and extremely knowledgeable gentleman.  He presented his topic with ease and made it flow like it was a part of him.  As he spoke however I began to lose some interest in what was being said.  It was not that the topic lacked interest however, it was moreover the fact that his voice seemed to be a little monotone, which in turn made the presentation seem to drag on and on and on.  Also, i was not impressed with the abilities to follow a time restraint, as there is about 40-45 minutes to present and he went almost 30 minutes over that.  It made it a little annoying and that in part could have contributed to the amount that I “tuned” out.  It wasn’t till the end that he actually talked about what he had come to talk about because he went on and on about the other components that are being looked at in the lab as we speak.  Over all I think he did a very good job.  He connected to the audience for the most part however I was not one of the people that was totally attentive to the discussion.

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This week’s seminar we were privileged to hear from Sean Reed on the topic of allylic C-H Amination. Mr. Reed, a graduate student, came to us from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

The main purpose of this seminar was to show the reactivity of the C-H bond in oxygenations and aminations. Typically, one doesn’t really think of alkanes as having any kind of functional group. In fact, alkanes will generally only react after being substituted with a halogen and then substituting the halogen for something else. However, Reed showed us that one could use a type of palladium compound to use as a activating group for the adjacent C-H bond.

Though this has been our first non-Ph.D. seminar presenter, I was impressed with his knowledge of organic synthesis. I was also very interested in the content of the lecture. I would be very interested to find out more of what further research reveals in this area.   I felt as though Mr. Reed had good experience working in a group setting based on his level of comfort upfront. For this seminar, I give it 9/10 for chemistry content, 10/10 for professionalism and 8/10 for student engagement.

To the layperson, I would say that this seminar was all about a specific method for making a difficult kind of chemical reaction work better.

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I was absent from the seminar, but I gathered some information about Sean Reed’s research from his flyer and his research director’s website. He is a graduate from Iowa State University, obtaining bachelors of science degree in chemistry and psychology. He is currently a graduate student at University of Illinois, Urban-Champaign. His research involves intermolecular C-H amination, and the strategic application of C-H activation reactions in complex molecule synthesis under the direction of Associate Professor M. Christina White.

His research focuses on discovering new, more efficient reactions that allows chemists to significantly shorten total synthesis of natural products by increasing the control of chemical reactivity and synthesizing complex molecules with higher levels of efficiency. He tries to discover such reactions that allows chemists to make highly complex molecules at the same efficiency acheived in nature.

Because of C-H bonds’ ubiquity in complex molecules and inertness to most organic transformation, they have typically been ignored in the context of methods development for total synthesis. His work and that of his mentor – Professor White – started a program to develop highly selective oxidation methods, similar to those found in nature, for the direct installation of oxygen, nitrogen and carbon functionalities into allylic and aliphatic C-H bonds of complex molecules and their intermediates. Their work relies on the subtle electronic and steric interactions between C-H bonds and small molecule transition metal complexes to achieve high selectivities, instead of using elaborate enzyme active sites as nature. Their main goal in research is to gain a fundamental and predictive understanding of these interactions through mechanistic studies.

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The chemistry seminar held on October 8, 2009 was given by our guest speaker Sean Reed. He talked about “Recent Advances in Allylic C-H Amination.”  Sean Reed received a bachelor’s degree in Chemistry and psychology at Iowa State University in 2005. He participated in research on biomass utilization when he was an undergraduate student. Following that, he started graduate studies at the University of Illinois participating in research with Associate Professor M. Christina White.  He has received nine awards through his undergraduate and graduate student life.

His research is about intermolecular allylic C-H amination and the strategic application of C-H activation reactions in complex molecules synthesis.  Specifically, this research allows chemists to shorten the synthesis of natural products by developing new, more efficient reactions. Through this process, there were three guiding principles for catalysis which are C-H cleavage, functionalization, and re-oxidation.

For this presentation, I think it was really long which led me to lose attention during the presentation.  However, I was impressed by shortening the steps in a synthesis and producing new functional groups through it. I was curious about the characteristics resulting from the new functional groups and how they can be applied to our lives. What interested me the most was the new functional group that he introduced.

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There are many complexities that occur in nature, and synthetic organic chemistry is not nearly able to reproduce all that nature can do. This can be very frustrating considering the high yields natural methods commonly give, and the valuable potential of many natural substances. Thus, while many synthetic laboratories focus on using known methods to create, in as few steps as possible, a specific organic compound, the White Research Group from the University of Illinois focuses on finding specifically useful methods of doing a common synthetic organic task. In this presentation specifically, Sean Reed focused upon describing his research group’s attempts to find synthetic methods for C-H amination under many circumstances.

The presentation itself was fairly complex. Though not specifically problematic, it was difficult for an undergraduate chemist with a full year of organic chemistry to follow. I can see the importance of discovering a method of successfully converting C-H bonds to amines in high yields.  But the seminar itself seemed to wander some, making the actual following of the process involved and difficult.

Despite some complexity with the issues involved, there were several important facts that could be gleaned. Activating ligands had to be good pi acceptors in order to draw electron density away and encourage the changing of functional groups. They found that linear allylic alcohols were difficult to synthesize. One of the most interesting things involved the fact that heterobimetallic catalysis worked, while either metal individually caused no reaction. This is unusual and is still being studied in the research.

The presentation overall was decent, but too involved to be readily understandable by an undergraduate audience. The material seems interesting enough if the concepts could be more thoroughly and directly grasped. I can see that the overall goal of this research is to make organic syntheses of all types cheaper and easier to complete, but the directly understood applications are not well defined other than it being another organic procedure to add to a synthetic chemist’s library.

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Thursday’s presentation was brought to us by graduate student Sean Reed.   Sean Reed is in his fourth year of graduate studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, studying under the direction of Associate Professor M. Christina White. He completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Iowa, with a degree in chemistry and psychology.  Although he is young, Reed has achieved many accomplishments and rewards early in his career, including several research publications and nine awards.  One was clearly able to see that Reed was very knowledgeable about his particular area of  research and was able to give good answers to the few questions asked.

I specifically learned that allylic C-H oxidation are used quite frequently by nature but have not yet been fully understood and used by synthetic organic chemists. The catalytic cycle was described and Reed explained that this cycle focuses on the catalyst as the main ‘actor,’ not the reactants or products as found in most reactions. I also learned that heterobimetallic catalysis uses two different transition metals for catalysis, and they both must be present for the reaction to occur.

Due to the fact of that Pd(II) is so selective, Reed’s discovery enables reactions to successfully proceed with unprotected functional groups in the starting material; therefore, unnecessary steps are cut out and reactions are able to proceed quickly and efficiently.  In conclusion I have to say that Mr. Reed’s work was very extensive and thorough, however I feel that the fact that his presentation went way over it’s allotted time frame kind of destroyed my overall attentiveness.  I believe that next time he should focus on the main ideas of his research, instead of mentioning all the less important details.  This will not only help him not to be to lengthly, it will help his audience stay more interested and fully understand the topic being presented.

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Sean Reed received a bachelors of science in chemistry and psychology at Iowa State University in 2005. In 2006, Reed began graduate studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, under the direction of Assistant Professor M. Christina White. Reed’s research includes intermolecular C-H animation and the strategic application of C-H activations reactions in complex molecular synthesis. This research has led to new, more efficient reactions that allow chemists to significantly shorten the total synthesis of natural products.

Reed was very prepared with many handouts of the research conducted and gave background to the experiments being discussed. I felt that this gave a good introduction of the information he was about to relay. Although the presentation had to be cut short, Reed was able to give a sufficient amount of information on C-H animation and the reason why these experiments were being performed.

Some of Reed’s goals for this research were to discover new pharmaceutical products, develop reactions that will make another molecule, perform functional group transformations, work with C-C bond formation, and achieve olefin oxidation. In allylic/aliphatic selective C-H oxidations for synthesis use metal oxo, nitrenes, and carbene catalysts. It was found for allylic C-H animation if one removed the metal catalysts, containing Pd and Cr(salen)Cl, then there was no reactivity for these reactions. Reed was able to learn what the reaction needed in order to work. It was also found that an n-allylPd intermediate was formed.

Another thing that I felt was interesting was the work being done with streamlining synthesis. Reed along with his group have previously demonstrated the ability of predictably selective C-H amination reactions to streamline the synthesis of nitrogen containing molecules. Students seemed tired by the end of this presentation, but we learned much and our questions were answered well.

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On October 8^th, there was a presentation about organic synthesis given by Sean Reed. He is a graduate student at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois. He graduated from the Iowa State University with a bachelor’s degree in Chemistry and psychology. Currently, Mr. Reed is doing a research with Professor White on intermolecular C-H amination, and the strategic application of C-H activation reactions in complex molecules synthesis.

Mr. Reed’s presentation title was “Recent Advances in Allylic C-H Amination.”  He started the presentation by introducing the class to a general basic process of synthesizing oxidized hydrocarbons, and allylic and aliphatic C-H oxidation product from nature. I learned that we can get oxidized hydrocarbons by using 3 different ways which are functional group transformation, C-C bond formation and olefin oxidation. Also, he talked about catalytic allylic C-H oxidation. Especially, in branched allylic oxidation, he and his research team members are using catalytic cycle, which is not focused on reactant or product, but on catalyst. As it was last week, the speaker did not state his purpose clearly, so I did not get the objective of the presentation even after the presentation was over. I was curious about how we can apply the results of the research in our daily lives. Overall, it was interesting that he spoke about a field that we never explored before in organic chemistry, even though I took sophomore organic chemistry.

I would tell my friends that the presentation was about looking for a more efficient way to synthesize chemical materials.

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This week’s speaker was Sean Reed from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  Reed was presenting research he had done with Christina White, titled “Recent Advances in Allylic C-H Amination.”  The White group investigated the reactions of allylic C-H bond.  The C-H bond is not normally very interesting; in fact, most organic chemists simply leave out the C-H bonds when drawing structures.  However, Reed spoke of ways to convert C-H bonds to C-O, C-C and C-N bonds.  In nature, allylic and aliphatic oxidations of C-H bonds take place.  Organic chemists have yet to duplicate this reaction, though.  The potential for this particular reaction is enormous, as it could transform complex molecules into simple ones.

Reed was looking at terminal olefins as a starting point for allylic C-H oxidations.  Terminal olefins are a good choice because they are chemically inert and can be selectively added.  In this process, Pd(OAc)2 is used as the catalyst.  The first step is heterolytic C-H cleavage, forming a palladium pi-allyl intermediate.  The palladium interacts with 3 carbons at once.  The 2nd step is functionalization, which puts an OAc group on the olefin.  Benzoquinone is used here.  The final step is re-oxidation with benzoquinone and AcOH to regenerate Pd(II).  Reed did not make any effort to exclude water or oxygen, and the reagents were simply mixed together in a vial.  Reed also talked about allylic amination reactions, in which an “X” group on the olefin can be replaced with nitrogen.  The “X” group is usually a halogen.  Palladium and iridium may be used as catalysts.  Direct C-H amination using an amine was also attempted.  The difficulty in this reaction is preventing the amine from binding with palladium.  At the same time, the amine needs to be nucleophilic enough to interact with the olefin.  Reed also discussed the synthesis of 1,3-amino alcohols using nosyl groups rather than tosyl groups.  The yields were generally very good, ranging from 67-87%.  However, the reactions were very sensitive to steric conditions.

Most of my fellow students did not like that the speaker went 30 minutes over the alloted time.  Reed covered a wide variety of material, but he moved too quickly for me to actually understand it.  While Reed provided a lot of supplementary material on the topic, this blog evaluates the presentation, not all the journals the speaker has published.  However, I recognized the potential of the C-H amination reaction.  I asked Reed if there were any natural processes he intended to mimic.  Reed didn’t have any specific process in mind, but he answered that catalysis could enhance natural reactions, not just mimic them.  I would like to know some practical applications for the allylic C-H amination.  I am also interested as to which natural processes involve allylic C-H amination or oxidation.  While I do not fully understand the chemistry, I look forward to seeing what the C-H amination can produce in years to come.  If I had to sum up this presentation for a layperson, I would say that C-H, a normally unreactive chemical bond, has been discovered to have many different reactions.

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This week’s seminar was on Recent Advances in Allylic C-H Amination. The speaker was Sean Reed. He graduated from Iowa State University with a bachelors of science degree in chemistry and psychology in 2005. He then went on to graduate school in 2006 at University of Illinois. His research interests include intermolecular C–H amination, and the strategic application of C–H activation reactions in complex molecule synthesis. He plans on graduating in 2011. He was a good speaker and interesting.

One of the new things I learned in this seminar was that chemists can make anything found in nature, they are mostly looking for ways to run the process faster. Another thing was that they were looking to take C-H bonds and make C-O, C-C, and C-N bonds. And that his group was looking at aliphatic C-H oxidations for synthetic applications.

The students were pretty attentive in the beginning, however this was our third week of looking at organic reactions and the presentation was longer than the time allotted to it, and so towards the end many of the students were struggling. The question and answer period was pretty short since we did not have a lot of time when we got to it.

The presentation encouraged me to learn more about the subject, but I would not be interested in doing research in it. The speaker did not really mention his graduate school so I was not really encouraged to go there. I think that the presentation was interesting because the material seemed very relevant; there was a lot that it could be used for. If I had to describe it in one sentence it would be “synthesizing organic compounds in fewer steps.”

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The groups of students and teachers present at Andrews University Chemistry Seminar were blessed to be given a presentation by Sean Reed.  Reed is a member of the White Research Group of the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign.  He is an Iowa native and graduated with a degree in chemistry and psychology from Iowa State University.  Currently, he is working on graduate studies with Professor Christina M. White in Illinois.  Thus far, he has published two research publications and has given two oral presentations within the past two years.  In his seminar, Reed described for us the recent advances in allylic C-H amination.  Once again, another super interesting organic synthesis project to learn about.  I really enjoy being educated in organic synthesis, mainly because when I took organic chemistry, Dr. Desmond Murray encouraged us to participate in independent research projects, which mainly consisted of organic synthesis.  Well back to Reed, his group is looking into allylic C-H amination to specifically add knowledge and to aid the development of new pharmaceuticals.

From his presentation, I learned three fascinating and new things about organic synthesis in the area of allylic C-H amination.  One idea that I found quite interesting is that oxidized hydrocarbons are molecules of life.  I never really looked at the concept like that before.  Reed explained further that through manipulation we can create other things.  He also talked about building carbon frameworks through functional group transformation.  Reed is mainly interested in allylic C-H oxidation synthesis of olefins.  He has hope that this reaction can be used in several areas of chemistry/biochemistry.  A second thing I learned from Reed is that catalytic allylic C-H oxidation works well with internal olefin and use with terminal olefins yields oxypalladation.  A third concept I learned is that sometimes focusing on intermediates instead of only reagents and products can help with the methodology of synthesis research.  When Reed and his group’s methods failed, they began to look at the intermediates and developed serial ligand catalysis as a guiding principle for catalysis.  Along with other methods, Reed was able to apply his learned methods to the intermediates and receive high percent yields of his desired product.  Reed presented a lot of information on his group’s research since 2004.  The presentation was a little long and overwhelming, but still enjoyable.

I thought Reed’s presentation was tremendously interesting and felt that it really gave me a close look at a really great synthesis project.  When Reed started, he first gave us an overview/outline of his talk.  I really appreciated him doing this because it helps us follow his presentation with a better understanding.   I did dose off a couple of times, but I don’t blame that on Reed’s presentation.  I’d rather blame the soothing dim lights and comfy chairs of the chemistry amphitheater.  Reed’s seminar and additional materials provided has pushed me to look a little more at research projects that are conducted in organic synthesis rather than biochemistry.  I believe the other students really liked Reed too, not just because of the amount of questions they asked him, but also because he presented his information with clarity, a pure interest, and lots of enthusiasm.

If I could sum Reed’s presentation up in one sentence it would be, “Allylic C-H amination can be tricky, but with determination and outside the box thinking, wonders can be done in this field of research.”

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The speaker on October 8 was Sean Reed, a graduate student from  the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His topic was about the functional group of allylic C-H, and how they can shorten reaction steps by using allylic C-H directly to make C-O, C-N, and other functional groups. Having been introduced to total synthesis before from one of our previous seminars (by Professor Silas Cook), I somewhat knew what was to be expected from Sean Reed’s presentation. Much like Professor Silas Cook, Sean Reed’s presentation was filled with slide after slide of reactions that were unfamiliar to me. While Cook did a great job on catering to our undergraduate-level understanding, Reed’s presentation left me disinterested and bored.

Despite my general inattentiveness, I was able to learn some new things from this lecture. I appreciated the handouts he had available so that we could read more about C-H functional group if we wanted to. I learned that they use total synthesis to find new pharmaceuticals as well as to tackle challenges for the 21st century. He said that anything that is found in nature could be synthesized and their goals were to increase yields and cut down on steps. That is where C-H comes into play because it is generally overlooked as a functional group. He then proceeded to show several different example of reactions with allylic C-H such as amination.

Though I’m sure the chemistry he talked about was interesting, it was difficult for me to understand and hard to follow. Because of this I did feel antsy as his talk went on past the allotted time. Aside from the content he did a great job on his presentation style and flow. If I were to describe this seminar to fellow nonspecialists I would say the goal of Reed’s presentation was to inform us on the many possibilities that can be obtained from a generally overlooked reaction type.

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Sean Reed, substituting for his professor Christina White, delivered a long seminar on their research in allylic C-H amination. A young man in his fourth year of graduate studies at the University of Illinois, Sean Reed had a bounty of articles published in JACS and various online chemistry sites to share with us. He also had a bounty of knowledge to share with us. And what a lot he had.

One of the novel and interesting chemistry bits Reed had in his seminar was the catalytic cycle. While he said that Prof. White usually skips over this part of the presentation because it scares people (a comment that made me sit up in my chair to use my 100% brain capacity), Reed went ahead and explained it to us. I was so caught up in how scary it was I wrote out the cycle in my notes. Another thing that caught my attention was that Reed often mentioned the availability, affordability, and/or ease of production of the materials used in the experiments. So when someone asked him about cost savings in mass market production, I was surprised when Reed answered that the research contributed more to a library of data rather than a development for mass production. Aside from what I remember and what I have in my notes, there was a substantial amount of information given to us.

Our seminars start at 4:30 p.m. and are supposed to end at 5:20 p.m. I don’t remember seeing the exact time the seminar finished that day, I would say that we got out around six. Reed started off by explaining that he was filling in for his professor who was very busy traveling currently and that this was the first time he would be presenting this seminar. So, an excuse is there – the man has never given this particular seminar before and was also presenting for someone else. However his style did not help the lengthy seminar either. There was just so much information packed in, so much about the research, and not a lot to help me stop dozing. If I had been awake for more of the presentation perhaps I would be able to write more about the research (I’m sorry, the seminar wasn’t a total snooze-fest – honestly I was more sleep-deprived than usual this week).

Reed’s certainly enthusiastic about the topic and knows what he was talking about. The problem for many of us was that he was not able to transfer that enthusiasm and knowledge effectively. We are undergraduates, most of us will not be going into research, and the sad truth is that we aren’t going to spend a lot of energy pursuing the understanding of the things presented in the seminars. Suggestions: dumb it down a little for us, keep us interested or at least conscious, and know your audience. The last point may be the most general and most important character for a good speaker. There’s something I really learned from this seminar.

Laymen’s Summary for Chemistry Seminar: There is a fantastic substrate that can help make steroids that selectively kills cancer cells; a lot of research went into that.

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Thursday’s lecture left me bored and disinterested in the topic that the speaker lectured about. It started out interesting, but by the end I had almost no interest in the topic, not because it was a dull topic mind you, but because of the way in which it was presented. The speaker kept droning on and on, sometimes in a seemingly endless fashion. I don’t believe that he finds the topic boring, but it seemed like he was trying to cram as much information and as many different aspects of the topic as he possibly could into the presentation, resulting in my finding the topic to be boring as well as my constantly looking at the clock to try and find an end to it all.

I did, however, learn something about synthesis. It was interesting to learn that palladium and iridium are the most common metals used in synthesis reactions. I do wonder why this is, and maybe it was covered and I just didn’t catch it. I would also like to know why the addition of donor ions to one of the reactants slowed down the reaction instead of speeding it up, as was expected. It was also interesting to learn that for the particular reaction they were looking for, acetone was key to the reaction.

If I were to describe the content of this lecture to one of my non-scientific friends, I would have to say that it was about how chemists take a chemical or chemical reaction that occurs in nature and try to duplicate it inside the lab without the help of nature. As for the speaker, his speaking style was lengthy and somewhat monotonous in nature. He tried to make his topic sound interesting, but came across as slightly dull.

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Chemistry seminar on October 8, 2009 was on Recent Advances in Allylic C-H Amination. The presentation was given by Sean Reed, a graduate student in the White Research Group at the University of Illinios. This contained bountiful amounts of information, again on the topic of organic chemistry.  The presentation style was consistent. I appreciate that Mr. Reed took the time at the first part of the presentation to try to describe the reaction he was intending to induce on a basic level. This is helpful to me as an undergraduate with little knowledge of advanced organic chemistry.

I was informed that allylic or aliphatic C-H oxidation are used frequently by nature but have not yet been mastered by synthetic organic chemists. The catalytic cycle was described and it was explained that this cycle focuses on the catalyst as the main objective not the reagents or products as most reactions do. I also learned that heterobimetallic catalysis uses two different transition metals for catalysis, and they both must be present for the reaction to occur.

During the seminar I had a question about the cost effectiveness of these procedures. It was mentioned that the starting materials are often more expensive in the reactions with less steps. I asked if the reaction with higher starting material costs is still cheaper overall than a reaction with more steps to the same product. Mr. Reed informed me that these types of reactions are not to be used on la arge scale. They are more for discovery so the higher initial cost is not an issue.

To describe Mr. Reed’s work to my friends or family I would say that he is trying to reduce the amount of steps it takes to make a product while attempting to attain higher yields.

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Thursday’s presentation was brought to us by Sean Reed, one of the youngest presenters I’ve seen since attending Chemsem. Sean Reed is in his fourth year of graduate studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, studying under the direction of Associate Professor M. Christina white. He completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Iowa, with a degree in chemistry and psychology.  Although he is young, Reed has achieved many accomplishments and rewards early in his career, including research publications and 9 awards. It was plainly evident that Reed was very knowledgeable about his research and was able to give excellent answers to all the questions asked. Finally, one last thing I appreciated about his presentation was the introduction, although lengthy, it gave a good foundation for his presentation.

Reed’s research group at the university of Illinois is focused on shortening the assembly of molecules by utilizing the often looked over C-H bonds, thus making the synthesis more efficient.  I was quite surprised to find out what all their research entailed. The White group was successful in selectively functionalizing C-H bonds, not only is this amazing, but they are able to selectively control the three dimensional structure of the product by distinguishing between different C-H bonds using Palladium under special conditions! Now that’s impressive, it’s amazing how God’s creation can work! Reed’s specific contribution to the work of functional C-H bonds is the discovery of the first catalytic Bronsted base strategy for nucleophilic activation under the acidic electrophilic conditions of oxidative palladium (II) catalysis. Reed spent quite a bit of time discussing the mechanism of the catalysis. Although some of the research material conducted by former students should have been more concise, I am glad that Reed discussed the catalysis in depth. The catalysis diagram helped clench the pieces together, giving me a bigger picture of what the White group had accomplished. Because of the specificity of the Pd(II), Reed’s discovery enables reactions to successfully proceed with unprotected functional groups in the starting material; thus, unnecessary steps are cut out and reactions are able to proceed quickly and efficiently.

The content of Reed’s work was one of the most fascinating I’ve seen so far (although I must say I had to really focus to keep up); however, a more concise presentation might be more beneficial to his audience. In looking back over the presentation, I learned about the amazing potential of what I thought were ordinary C-H bonds, a new mechanism for metal catalysts, and the details of how catalysis works. If I could go back to Reed’s presentation I would ask him how the Pd(II) contributes to the mechanism? (i.e. what exactly is it doing, electron movement, etc.), considering that Pd(II) and Cr are not close on the periodic table, why is it that these two work? and if other metals besides Cr and Pd(II) can be used/or why they can’t be used in this mechanism.

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Sean Reed came to talk to us today from the University of Illinois, where he works with the White Research Group. His talk was entitled “Recent Advances in Allylic C-H Amination”. Mr. Reed brought with him as supplement for his talk a lot of extra material that he laid out in the back for us to take to learn more about what he does.

He started his talk by giving a little bit of background of what the White Research Group does, and a little bit about his topic. On thing he mentioned that I found interesting was what has been said, that any molecule that is found in nature, chemists can synthesize. Something that was a repeating thing throughout the entire seminar that I think I missed in the beginning was what an olefin was. Most of his talk had to do with how to convert a C-H bond to other kinds of bonds such as C-O, C-C, or C-N.

I did not find Mr. Reed’s talk very interesting, it is hard for me to stay attentive when we mainly see slide after slide of reactions for the entire presentation. Something else that I had a hard time with is how long it took. I realize that sometimes there is a lot of information to fit into the given 50 minutes, but going over by 30 minutes is a bit rough. I would describe this seminar as showing different ways to change atomic bonds into other kinds of bonds.

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