Events

Event Description

Please join the Chemistry Department for a talk by Professor Eric Nacsa, Assistant Professor of Chemistry at Penn State University.

New Open-Shell Strategies in Organic Synthesis

The Nacsa Group uses electron transfer techniques and designs open-shell systems to address challenges in organic synthesis. This talk will focus on two of our interest areas. The first program leverages radical-mediated migration events, usually initiated by photoinduced electron transfer, as key design elements in complexity-generating transformations. We have shown that olefin difunctionalizations underpinned by this approach can access product classes and achieve stereoselectivities that have otherwise proven challenging or impossible. More recently, we also discovered a novel photoinduced reductive elimination from sulfur that enables the direct conversion of aryl sulfonamides to aryl amines. The second program uses easily installed third-row main-group phosphonium and sulfonium ions as handles on (hetero)aromatic rings to confer new reactivity. Following the regioselective attachment of these units, new reactivities with radicals, and regioselectivities with radicals and polar substrates, can be achieved at other C–H sites. Removal of the ions to restore the initial H atom allows for a formal, traceless C–H functionalization, or their substitutions complete novel C–H/C–H difunctionalization sequences.?

Eric was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and grew up nearby in Kingston, Ontario. He graduated with a BSc in Chemistry from Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, CA in 2010, where he worked on the total synthesis of sesquiterpene natural products. He received a PhD from Columbia University in 2015, studying synthetic applications of aromatic ions with Tristan Lambert. He finished his training with David MacMillan at Princeton University as an NIH postdoctoral fellow developing light-promoted asymmetric transformations. Eric began his independent career at Penn State University in 2019. His lab has received support from ACS PRF, NSF CAREER, and NIH R35 awards.