Submitted by Maggie Geselbracht / Reed College on Sat, 04/04/2009 - 02:59
Forums

We have a Junior Qualifying Exam at Reed, which in our department takes the form of an oral exam based on a recent paper from the primary literature for each student.  I just finished picking 4 papers for this year's crop of inorganic junior quals.  The students have 3 days to learn everything they can about the paper before the oral exam in front of 2 faculty.  Several of these choices were inspired by talks I heard at the ACS Salt Lake City meeting.

Although these literature papers are not yet fully developed learning objects, for my students they draw on many of the themes that we have discussed in class.  Perhaps they might be useful for someone else to use as the basis of a class discussion or problem set questions.  If you do develop a learning object from these, I hope you will post it back to VIPEr!

Arguably, some of these might be considered organometallic chemistry topics, but I thought this forum might be a more general place to put the collection. 

 

1)  Brandi M. Cossairt, Mariam-Céline Diawara, Christopher C. Cummins, “Facile Synthesis of AsP3,” Science 2009, 323, 602.

This paper is very short, but the supporting information provides a lot of good material for discussion questions.

 

 2) Cristina Femoni, Maria Carmela Iapalucci, Giuliano Longoni, Stefano Zacchini,* and Salvatore Zarra, “New Findings in the Chemistry of Iron Carbonyls: The Previously Unreported [H4-nFe4(CO)12]n– (n = 1, 2) Series of Clusters, Which Fills the Gap with Ruthenium and Osmium,” Inorg. Chem. 2009, 48, 1599-1605.

 

3)  Neal P. Mankad, Matthew T. Whited, and Jonas C. Peters, “Terminal FeI–N2 and FeII ···H–C Interactions Supported by Tris(phosphino)silyl Ligands, ” Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. Engl. 2007, 46, 5768-5771.

 

4) Jian-Zhong Wu, Filippo De Angelis, Thomas G. Carrell, Glenn P. A. Yap, John Sheats, Roberto Car, and G. Charles Dismukes, “Tuning the Photoinduced O2-Evolving Reactivity of Mn4O47+, Mn4O46+, and Mn4O3(OH)6+ Manganese–Oxo Cubane Complexes,” Inorg. Chem. 2006, 45, 189-195.

 

 

 

Hilary Eppley / DePauw University
Our department recently used the following paper for our senior comprehensive exam:

Shimakoshi, H.; Shibata, K.; Hisaeda, Y. "Molecular Recognition of Redox-Switchable Bis-Crown Moieties Assembled on a Dicobalt Complex" Inorg. Chem 2009, 48,1045-1052.

It would make a nice one for discussing geometry changes with oxidation state. Careful, one of the figures was wrong on the paper (at least initially) and was just a duplicate of another figure in the paper! --Hilary

Thu, 04/09/2009 - 10:15 Permalink
Anne Bentley / Lewis & Clark College

Cossairt and Cummins published a longer article later in 2009 that I am considering using as an in-class discussion article in a couple of weeks.  (It's Cossairt, B. M., Cummins, C. C. JACS, 2009, 1431, 15501-15511.  If I do develop a series of questions, I'll post them here.

We are also reading the August 2008 Kanan and Nocera paper - the one that describes the incredibly easy to make Co-phosphate oxygen-evolving catalyst.  It's a good paper for discussing redox concepts, semiconductors, and even complex stability to substitution.  See Kanan, M. W.; Nocera, D. G. Science 2008, 321, 1072-1075.

-Anne

Thu, 04/08/2010 - 19:45 Permalink