National ACS Award Winners 2022 LO Collection

Submitted by Shirley Lin / United States Naval Academy on Sat, 03/12/2022 - 07:01

This collection of learning objects was created to celebrate the National ACS Award Winners 2022 who are members of the Division of Inorganic Chemistry. The list of award winners is shown below. 

1FLO: Addition of H2 to four-coordinate iridium

Submitted by Chip Nataro / Lafayette College on Wed, 10/22/2025 - 13:41
Description

This paper (J. Organomet. Chem. 2022, 965-966, 122317) describes the synthesis and reactivity of four-coordinate iridium compound with a tridentate ligand. This ligand is referred to in the paper as a pincer ligand which are a general class of tridentate ligands that coordinate in a mer- arrangement.

Metallocene cations and anions

Submitted by Chip Nataro / Lafayette College on Tue, 09/23/2025 - 11:39
Description

This is a really interesting paper in J. Am. Chem. Soc. (2025, 147, 34641-34646) involving a complex salt in which both the cation and anion are metallocenes. While a majority of the paper is focused on the characterization of two new compounds, it presents some excellent opportunities to practice counting electrons, one of which was a challenge to this author.

Rhenium isocyanide complexes from the Figueroa group

Submitted by Chip Nataro / Lafayette College on Tue, 08/26/2025 - 13:34
Description

This literature discussion is in honor of Dr. Josh Figueroa, recipient of the 2026 F. Albert Cotton Award in Synthetic Inorganic Chemistry. Josh has done some tremendous work with isocyanide ligands and this paper is but a brief glimpse into this field. The complexes of interest contain carbonyl ligands and isocyanide ligands, so there are plenty of opportunities for students to use group theory to predict the number of IR-active vibrations for these ligands.

Hydrocyanation
Description

This literature discussion was inspired by a talk given by Dr. Nora Radu, recipient of the 2025 ACS Award for Distinguished Service in the Advancement of Inorganic Chemistry. It is a bit 'big picture' in nature in that the hydrocyanation reaction is important for the synthesis of nylon. As such, there is a significant amount of background material relating to nylon-6,6. Students will read an article from C&EN, portions of a patent, and portions of an article from J. Chem.

Chip Nataro / Lafayette College Mon, 07/07/2025 - 07:35

COMFORT, A web resource for fragment molecular orbitals of simple fragments

Submitted by samuelson / Indian Institute of Science on Tue, 06/17/2025 - 02:56
Description

The website entitled COMFORT (https://ipc.iisc.ac.in/~ags/ip312/comfort.html) is a easy way to visualise fragment molecular orbitals of many different organic ligands and also metal fragments. One can match the frontier orbitals of the fragments to see if they can form stable molecules. It helps one to see how fragments of an octahedral organometallic complex can be stripped of its ligands one by one to generate fragments that can match organic ligands with multiple "pi" bonds.

Determining Oxidation State: The Arrow Pushing Method

Submitted by Jared Pienkos / University of Tennessee at Chattanooga on Mon, 04/14/2025 - 10:05
Description
    1. Determining the oxidation state of atoms is foundational in chemistry. For inorganic chemistry, students must be able to accurately calculate oxidation numbers of transition metals, which can differ depending on the ligands attached.

Flipping Cobalt Spin States

Submitted by James F. Dunne / Central College on Fri, 02/21/2025 - 12:01
Description

This activity was designed to assess student comprehension of how changes in pi-donation from ligands can affect both crystal field splitting and metal spin states.  The activity requires students to practice electron counting, idealized crystal field splitting, and then apply these concepts to explain the observed change from low to high spin caused by the loss of a proton.

Subscribe to Organometallic chemistry