Dalton Transactions Blog

Professor Mircea Dincă (MIT, USA)

The 2015 Dalton Transactions Lecture awardee – Professor Mircea Dincă (MIT, USA) – delivered his presentation at UC Berkeley in March 2016. This Lecture is awarded annually to an exceptional young inorganic chemist in the Americas. Previous recipients are:

2014 Christine Thomas (Brandeis University)

2013 Trevor Hayton (UCSB)
2012 Teri Odom (Northwestern University)
2011 Daniel Gamelin (U Washington)
2010 Paul Chirik (Princeton University)
2009 Francois Gabbai (Texas A & M University)
2008 Dan Mindiola (Indiana University)
2007 Geoff Coates (Cornell University)
2006 John Hartwig (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
2005 Kit Cummins (MIT)

Each Dalton Transactions Lecture awardee is provided with an honorarium and a commemorative plaque.

Professor Dincă is an Assistant Professor of Chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research focuses on the functional chemistry of inorganic and metal-organic materials, with a current emphasis on porous materials and high-nuclearity metal clusters.

Congratulations to Professor Dincă for his Dalton Transactions Lecture award!

A team of scientists in China and France has made a rhenium-based catalyst that reduces carbon dioxide under visible light, providing a practical alternative to UV-sensitive catalysts.

By tuning the complex's ligands, researchers designed a rhenium catalyst that reduces carbon dioxide under visible light

With atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations increasing, scientists are searching for ways to halt the rise. One method is to capture the gas and convert it to chemical feedstock. But significant energy is required for its conversion. Considerable effort has, therefore, been devoted to developing catalysts for carbon dioxide’s electrochemical or photochemical reduction.

Interested? The full article can be read in Chemistry World.

The original article can be read below:

Photochemical and electrochemical catalytic reduction of CO₂ with NHC-containing dicarbonyl rhenium(I) bipyridine complexes
Antoine Maurin, Chi-On Ng, Lingjing Chen, Tai-Chu Lau, Marc Robert* and Chi-Chiu Ko*
Dalton Trans., 2016, Advance Article
DOI: 10.1039/C6DT01686C

Dalton Transactions has been a home for high quality inorganic, organometallic and bioinorganic chemistry research since the late 1960s. One paper in particular has received resounding attention from the community and is one of the most highly cited inorganic papers of all time.

In 1984, ‘Synthesis, structure, and spectroscopic properties of copper(II) compounds containing nitrogen–sulphur donor ligands; the crystal and molecular structure of aqua[1,7-bis(N-methylbenzimidazol-2′-yl)-2,6-dithiaheptane]copper(II) perchlorate’ was published in the Journal of the Chemical Society, Dalton Transactions. This work was the result of a collaboration between the Addison lab at Drexel University, USA, and the Reedijk lab at Leiden University, the Netherlands. It outlines a model for the active site of the Type-1 copper protein azurin, and was the first publication to introduce the τ (tau) parameter as a structural descriptor for 5-coordinate compounds.

Early citations of the work were related to copper proteins and models for them, and it was used for electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) vs. structure correlation. However, it was not until the early 1990s that this ‘sleeping beauty’, a term coined¹ for papers whose importance lies dormant for many years before they are recognized and citations start to rise, was awoken. The τ parameter, now also known as the geometry index or structural parameter, is what led to the paper’s rise in popularity. Researchers began to adopt the parameter to determine the coordination center geometry of a given molecule of interest. It has a value between 0 and 1, and when expressed in the extremes, this indicates that a molecule will either be square pyramidal or trigonal bipyramidal, respectively. The team later also developed the ‘disphenoidality’ parameter (φ_t) for four-coordination.

With over five and a half thousand citations to date, and a continued steady rise of approximately 10 citations a week, the significance and appreciation for this parameter is clearly shown by the community. When describing his work, Addison explains his motivation for inventing the τ -parameter “I simply couldn’t figure out how to compare differently ‘irregular’ pentacoordinate centres easily using metrics such as the Muetterties/Guggenberger² parameter sets” and adds “I suppose this has become our “iPod” paper – the thing that people wanted, but didn’t appreciate beforehand how much they wanted it!  But a difference is that Steve Jobs actually realised in advance that people would find the iPod useful”. Addison goes on to conclude “I think it provides a demonstration of the utility of simplicity for helping in understanding otherwise complicated ideas.”

Dalton Transactions is proud to be the home of this pioneering work and eagerly awaits the break in slumber of today’s sleeping beauties.

References

1. Q. Ke, E. Ferrara, F. Radicchi, & A. Flammini,  Proc. Natl Acad. Sci., 2015, 112 (24), 7426-7431, DOI10.1073/pnas.1424329112

2. E.L. Muetterties & L.J. Guggenberger, J. Am. Chem. Soc., 1974, 96 (6), 1748-1756, DOI: 10.1021/ja00813a017