Harvey Mudd College chemistry professor Maduka Ogba recently coauthored two papers with students and secured a $70,000 grant from the American Chemical Society Petroleum Research Fund, all centered on comprehensive research in green chemistry and catalyst design.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The first paper, \u201cEffect of strain and \u03c0-acidity on the catalytic efficiency of carbones in carbodiimide hydroboration,\u201d was published in Organic and Biomolecular Chemistry.<\/em> This work explores how zero-valent carbon compounds, known as carbones, can be used as highly reactive metal-free catalysts. The team uncovered how these unique compounds reduce unsaturated molecules\u2014like carbodiimides\u2014into useful precursors for pharmaceuticals and agrochemicals, all through atom-economical processes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A second paper, \u201cComputations illuminate emerging reactivity of metal-free carbones,\u201d appeared in Trends in Chemistry.<\/em> It surveys the latest research on carbones and outlines their potential to revolutionize organocatalysis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Both papers are co-authored by Ogba, with Max Schernikau \u201927 as the first author.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI am grateful to have had the opportunity to work toward these papers, and I\u2019m excited to share my work at conferences this summer and during the academic year,\u201d said Schernikau, who has an interest in organic chemistry and reaction mechanisms. \u201cResearch in this lab has opened my eyes to a whole new world of computational theoretical chemistry.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n In Ogba\u2019s lab, Schernikau works on developing potential mechanisms for reactions and then generating molecules based on the mechanisms so the team can collect this data. \u201cI analyze the data to extract important values and make figures that summarize my findings,\u201d Schernikau said. He\u2019s joined in Ogba\u2019s lab by Aresema Ata \u201928, Nora Nickolov \u201928, Nata Velarde-Alvarez \u201928 and Zaan Saeed \u201928, who has been instrumental in introducing machine learning to enhance the researchers\u2019 work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Building on the momentum from the recent papers, Ogba received funding from ACS for the project titled \u201cComputational Investigation of the Reactivity and Thermal Stability of Zerovalent Carbon Compounds (carbones) as Catalysts for CO\u2082 Reductive Functionalization.\u201d This interdisciplinary project combines organic chemistry, catalysis, machine learning and data analytics to address the urgent need for carbon recycling. Students will explore how to transform excess CO\u2082 into high-value chemicals, offering a potential offset to the rising surplus of this greenhouse gas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cStudents collaborate, and they get to think about one chemical problem from many different areas,\u201d said Ogba, who adds that he\u2019s impressed with Harvey Mudd students and their willingness to learn and contribute to the research. \u201cThey\u2019re eager to get their hands dirty and bring fresh ideas\u2014from machine learning to experimental design\u2014that are pushing the research in new directions.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Harvey Mudd College chemistry professor Maduka Ogba recently coauthored two papers with students and secured a $70,000 grant from the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":47,"featured_media":14264,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,14,967,213,26,30],"class_list":["post-14263","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-chemistry","category-faculty","category-general-feed","category-grant","category-research","category-students"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14263","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/47"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14263"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14263\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14265,"href":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14263\/revisions\/14265"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14264"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14263"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14263"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}