This literature discussion was created for the ACS National Award Winners 2026 collection for Prof. Chad Mirkin, the recipient of the 2026 ACS Award in the Chemistry of Materials for “establishing the field of colloidal crystal engineering with DNA.” This LO is based on the article, "A General Approach to DNA-Programmable Atom Equivalents" published in Nature Materials, 2013, 12, 741.
This literature discussion LO was created for the ACS National Award Winners 2026 collection for Dr. Jonas C. Peters, the recipient of the ACS Award in Inorganic Chemistry. This LO is based on the article "Terminal Iron–Dinitrogen and Iron–Imide Complexes Supported by a Tris(phosphino)borane Ligand" published in Angewandte Chemie Int. Eng.
This activity allows students to manipulate highly symmetric objects and find the symmetry elements that are present.
This collection of learning objects was created to celebrate the National ACS Award Winners 2026 who conduct research related to inorganic chemistry.
The list of award winners included in this collection are shown below. (* denotes learning object pending) IONiC members are welcome to develop more LOs for the collection.
You might be familiar with the wonderful symmetry site that was (to my knowledge) originally published on the Jacobs University site and with the name change to the Constructor University site. In addition to having wonderful character tables, the site allowed you to enter reducible representations that the site would then reduce. It would also allow you to the full range of molecular motions or select vibrations (both IR and Raman active). The site has disappeared from time to time and it is unclear if it will ever return.
This literature discussion is in honor of the work of Shigeyoshi Inoue, winner of the 2026 Frederic Stanley Kipping Award in Silicon Chemistry for “groundbreaking contributions to the synthesis and reactivity of low-valent silicon compounds, and advancing the potential of silicon in metal-free catalysis and small-molecule activation” (https://cen.acs.org/a
As a collaboration with Rajas Ketkar (an excellent student in my inorganic chemistry class), we now have an online tool that you can use to "pull" a vertical line across each Tanabe-Sugano diagram and read off the intersecting E/B values. This should make the process easier and more intuitive for students. Please credit Rajas when using in your classes!
The McIndoe Group has a collection of Organometallic Chemistry-related videos that are useful for teaching students about techniques, such as glovebox maintenance and testing for peroxides.
As of January 2026, there were 91 videos on their channel.
Two worksheets are given that walk students though visualizing and understanding solid state structure. The first worksheet focuses on metallic structure by introducing primitive, body-centered, and face-centered packing types in a cubic unit cell. Then, close packing structures are described followed by a discussion of holes in close packed or primitive packed lattices. The second worksheet introduces ionic solid structure types for the common binary salt lattices as well as perovskite and spinel structure types.
This literature discussion comes from a paper in the Turkish Journal of Chemistry (1999, 23, 9-14) https://journals.tubitak.gov.tr/chem/vol23/iss1/2/. In this paper, the authors report spectroscopic data for nine compounds, [M(CO)4(PP)] (M = Cr, Mo or W; PP = dppm, dppe, dppp). This is a very fundamental paper and as such, students are not expected to have had any significant coursework in inorganic chemistry.