Iron catalysts are being engineered to replace expensive and toxic precious metals like palladium in the chemical reactions that produce pharmaceuticals, agrochemicals, and fine chemicals. The problem is that iron-based catalysts, despite being cheap and abundant, currently perform too poorly for practical use. This is because chemists lack a fundamental understanding of how iron catalysts actually work at the molecular level—what the active catalyst looks like, how ligands affect it, and why reactions sometimes fail. Without this knowledge, improving iron catalysts has been guesswork. The researcher has developed a physical-inorganic approach to map these molecular details. Over the past decade, this method has revealed unprecedented insight into iron-catalysed reactions. The project will extend this approach to new reaction types—olefin metathesis, alkyl borylation, reductive cross-coupling—and tackle long-standing challenges like activating carbon-hydrogen and carbon-carbon bonds with iron. If successful, this fundamental science will provide the blueprint for designing iron catalysts that match or surpass palladium in performance. The result would be cheaper, less toxic, and more sustainable manufacturing of the chemicals that underpin modern medicine and materials—without the reader needing to notice the change.
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Transition metal catalysis has solved countless problems in total synthesis, pharmaceutical chemistry, and the production of fine chemicals. While these reactions have traditionally been performed using platinum group metals (PGMs), there has been a recent push to develop methods that circumvent the need for expensive and toxic precious metal catalysts. A growing body of research has demonstrated that iron can be an excellent catalyst across a wide variety of organic transformations, including C-C cross-couplings C-H functionalisations, and olefin functionalisations. While such methods offer tremendous potential for sustainable bond breaking and bond making reactions across the breadth of modern organic synthesis, these iron-based methods remain largely uncompetitive with PGMs for practical use in organic synthesis. Central to this challenge has been the absence of detailed molecular-level understanding across these iron-based reactions, hindering rational catalyst development. This limitation is in stark contrast to palladium chemistry, where detailed studies of active catalyst structure and mechanism have provided the foundation for the continued design and development of catalysts with novel and/or improved catalytic performance. The long-term goal of the PI is to unleash the untapped potential of iron catalysis across the breadth of bond making (e.g. C-C, C-N, C-B) and bond breaking (e.g. C-H, C-C) reactions central to organic synthesis through the development of unprecedented insight into active catalyst structure, ligand effects, and mechanism of iron-catalysed organic transformations. In turn, this foundational insight will provide the basis to inspire and facilitate necessary improvements in current iron catalytic systems to not only make them competitive with existing palladium methods, but also to enable the development of bespoke ligands and iron catalysts that will greatly expand the scope and utility of iron for organic synthesis. To accomplish this goal, the PI has pioneered an innovative physical-inorganic approach to define the nature of the active iron catalysts, ligand and additive effects on product yields and reaction efficiencies, and the unproductive pathways that hamper optimal catalytic performance. Over the past decade, this approach has enabled the PI to achieve unparalleled insight into iron-catalysed C-C cross-couplings, hydromagnesiation and C-H functionalisation reactions in organic synthesis. Having recently re-located to the UK, this fellowship will also enable the PI to maintain their leadership in the field and inspire a new iron age of sustainable organic synthesis in the UK, expanding their research program into important new classes of iron-catalysed reactions (e.g., olefin metathesis, alkyl borylation, reductive cross-coupling) and decades-long challenges in organoiron chemistry and catalysis (e.g. C-H and C-C bond activation with iron). The results of this ambitious project will be a step change in our fundamental understanding of iron-based catalysts and reaction methodologies in order to achieve transformational catalytic performance to enable more sustainable organic synthesis in the 21st century.
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