Ian Tonks
University of Minnesota, MN·Chemistry
Nitrogen-containing ring molecules appear in most medicines, and plastics are everywhere in daily life. Both depend on chemists being able to make and break specific chemical bonds cleanly.
- Fields
Chemistry
Materials Science
- Topics
catalysis
amination
proton-coupled electron transfer
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Apr 2031
What they work on
- Develop iron- and titanium-catalyzed multi-site proton-coupled electron transfer (MS-PCET) reactions that pull hydrogen from amines under mild conditions, producing reactive nitrene precursors for amination.
- Expand the FeCl3-catalyzed N–H coupling to new reactions that form N–N and N–O bonds, giving routes to indazoles, isoxazoles and piperazic acid without hydrazine reagents.
- Explore how light drives metal imido (M=NR) compounds, which hold a metal–nitrogen double bond, to enable new electrophilic and biphilic amination reactions on an early transition metal platform.
- Create bench-stable titanium reagents for high-throughput screening, where many reactions run in parallel, to fill a gap in titanium catalytic methods.
- Develop metal- and organo-catalyzed [3,3]-sigmatropic rearrangements that convert vinyl-containing polyesters and polyurethanes between branched and linear forms, changing their glass transition temperature and crystallinity.
- Use the stereospecific [3,3]-rearrangement to carry tacticity, a polymer chain's 3D arrangement, into the new polymer, and apply mechanical force to bias the reaction toward linear isomers.
More about the research
Today many of these bond-forming steps need hazardous reagents, or they cannot be done at all. This work develops catalysts, substances that speed up reactions without being used up, that make new bonds possible. One project builds nitrogen–nitrogen and nitrogen–oxygen bonds for drug-like molecules using cheap, abundant metals. A second, collaborative project rearranges the bonds in plastic backbones to tune how plastics behave.
Why it matters
Most FDA-approved small-molecule drugs contain nitrogen rings, and many syntheses still rely on toxic, explosive hydrazine or hydroxylamine reagents. Safer catalytic routes to N–N and N–O bonds could give medicinal chemists faster access to new drug-like molecules such as indazoles. Separately, editing plastic architecture after the plastic is made could help engineers design materials with adjustable properties. These include force-responsive plastics and plastics that degrade or recycle more easily.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Jeffrey Lipshultz
Stony Brook University, NY·Chemistry·Early-career
Develop bench-stable bipyridinyl titanium chloride complexes that, when excited by light through ligand-to-metal charge transfer, generate chlorine radicals that functionalize C–H bonds through hydrogen atom transfer.
Kara Bren
University of Rochester, NY·Chemistry
Develop torquoselective and catalytic asymmetric 4-pi and 6-pi electrocyclizations of N-alkenylnitrones, where the direction of ring closure sets handedness, to make enantioenriched azetidine nitrones and oxazines.
Douglas Frantz
Washington University in St Louis, MO·Chemistry
Discover and design metal-based catalysts that selectively form either C–O or C–N bonds when alkylating N,O-heterocycles, taming their ambident reactivity.
The school
University of Minnesota: 88 labs on PI Pages, $1.4B a year on research, 722 research doctorates a year.
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