Richard Liu
Harvard University, MA·Chemistry·Early-career
Many medicines are made using rare transition metals such as palladium. These metals drive some of chemistry's most useful bond-forming reactions, but they are toxic, expensive, environmentally damaging and increasingly scarce.
- Fields
Chemistry
- Topics
organic catalysis
metal-free catalysis
pseudometals
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Jun 2029
What they work on
- Demonstrate that organic, metal-free "pseudometal" catalysts can perform oxidative addition and reductive elimination, then assemble these steps into catalytic cycles that mimic palladium-catalyzed cross-coupling.
- Extend pseudometal catalysts to new cross-coupling reactions impossible with conventional metals, giving faster access to new drug-like chemical space.
- Combine electrochemistry with redox-active organic molecules to make weak X–H bonds that act like metal hydrides, and use them to functionalize alkenes and alkynes by hydrogen-atom transfer.
- Develop visible-light photoacids, molecules that become strongly acidic when illuminated, and reversible photobases to capture and release CO2, characterizing them by in situ spectrophotometry, pH and CO2 measurement, and ultrafast spectroscopy.
- Determine the thermodynamic requirements for effective CO2-controlling photoswitches through systematic synthesis and testing, including combinations with traditional amine sorbents.
More about the research
Separately, removing carbon dioxide (CO2) from emissions or from the air takes a lot of energy. Both projects rely on the same strategy: design organic molecules whose electron-transfer or light-response behavior can be tuned to do jobs usually done by metals or by energy-hungry processes.
Why it matters
Drug discovery and manufacturing depend on scarce, toxic metals, and metal-free catalysts could keep the synthesis of essential medicines going as supplies shrink, while also opening routes to new drug structures. The light-driven CO2 work could lead to devices that use sunlight to pull CO2 from smokestacks or the atmosphere and release it for storage or reuse.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Christopher Sandford
University of Texas at San Antonio, TX·Chemistry
Develop an organometallic catalyst whose site selectivity switches when irradiated with different wavelengths of visible or ultraviolet light, so one catalyst can react at different sites on a molecule.
Sebastien Laulhe
Indiana University-Purdue University-Indianapolis, IN·Chemistry
Design aryl radicals with tuned steric bulk and electronic properties, generated from light-activated electron-donor-acceptor (EDA) complexes, to remove hydrogen atoms selectively from specific C(sp3)-H bonds.
Emily Tsui
University of Notre Dame, IN·Chemistry·Early-career
Characterize oxidation and reduction reactions at the surfaces of metal chalcogenide semiconductor nanocrystals, including oxidative addition and reductive elimination, using infrared and electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) spectroscopic reporters.
The school
Harvard University: 42 labs on PI Pages, $1.5B a year on research, 712 research doctorates a year.
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