Chemistry Weekly Seminar - Stephen Foley, University of Saskatchewan

Title

An idiot’s guide to chemistry Vol. 1: I gone did some fun stuff yesterday

Abstract

A decades-long love affair with chemistry will be presented. Warning: Not for the faint of heart. This relationship has had its up and downs and there have been break-ups. Any success that might be presented has been the result of work, luck and ignorance on my part. And really good grad students. In increasing order of importance.

It all started in high school circa the late 1980s where my initial chemistry education resulted from unmotivated teachers with English degrees. Next up will be a move to undergrad in the 90s where the curriculum of yesteryear is virtually identical to that of today, just the textbooks have gotten A LOT more expensive. Yes, organic chemistry still sucked back then.

BScH honours project: polymerize ferrocene derivatives (unsuccessful).

Things really picked up in grad school, where a major realization dawned: not all chemistry has to have an application.

PhD project: heteronuclear multiple bonding in heavy main group elements (successful!).

Suddenly it was the 2000s and I was off to the USofA where my ignorance was rewarded, even revered. I was hired as a postdoc because (and I quote): “You do not know enough to not know what you should not be doing”.

PDF project: copolymerize ethylene with polar monomers via a migratory insertion mechanism (unsuccessful, but highly educational!).

Then one day in the mid 2000s, UofS showed up and offered a job with a promise of wealth far beyond anything I had ever seen. At this point in the rambling narrative, it should be pointed out that any modicum of success at UofS is entirely the fault of the grad and undergrad students that have toiled in S262, some of whom are credited below.

The focus of the presentation from this point (finally!) will begin briefly with early work in olefin polymerization by Jeremy Olson and C-C coupling by Tressia Paulose and Jackson Chitanda. They paved the initial path to a long-time affair with structure-activity relationships of novel ligands with transition metals. Hiwa Salimi and later Loghman Moradi entered the lab and they would have none of this catalysis stuff we had been doing up to that point. They were interested in developing ligands for recovery of precious metals (apparently, they wanted jobs). Their (very) successful investigations into solvent extraction of gold with dithiobiuret ligands resulted in the group refocussing its efforts into precious metal recovery and recycling. The majority of the second half will focus on the recent results of Lan Huang, Braeden Dessert and Mario Proulx and their tremendous work into recovery of precious metals. Braeden contributed to the understanding of solvent extraction chemistry in the gold systems and developed a wide variety of gold-extracting ligands under the dithiobiuret banner. Lan figured out how to apply the chemistry to Pd and has a knack for crystallizing everything she touches. Mario worked out how to recover Ag with ligands from the dithiobiuret family. To be continued…