Computational Investigations of Organometallic Catalysis

Organometallic catalysis facilitates the synthesis of diverse products ranging from polyolefin materials to pharmaceutical compounds, and catalyst performance depends in part on the design of the ligand scaffold. Towards computational ligand design, quantum mechanical methods more fully capture chemical reactivity in comparison to classical methods, but are more computationally demanding. Free energy calculations of key elementary steps of the catalytic cycle permit the computational prediction of catalyst performance and allow modifications of the ligand structure to be explored. In the dissertation, experimental and computational investigations of organometallic catalysis focuses on rational ligand design. Embedding techniques such as embedded mean field theory (EMFT) and quantum mechanics/molecular mechanics (QM/MM) are leveraged in free energy calculations to allow for the reduction of wall-clock times of energy calculations and trajectory sampling. The organometallic systems investigated include Group IV polyolefin catalysts capable of co-polymerization and enantioselective cross-coupling nickel catalysts. Additionally, experimental methodology development is discussed for a nickel-catalyzed cross-coupling of alkynyl nucleophiles to tertiary electrophiles.