National ACS Award Winners 2022 LO Collection
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.
SLiThErs - Supporting Learning with Interactive Teaching: a Hosted, Engaging Roundtable
A collection of all of the IONiC VIPEr SLiThErs (Supporting Learning with Interactive Teaching: a Hosted, Engaging Roundtable). These events are short presentations on a topic followed by a period of discussion between the presenter and live participants. Each of these events is recorded and posted to the IONiC VIPEr YouTube Channel.
Si and Ge ferrocenes
Description
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
McIndoe Organometallic Group Videos
Kyle Grice / DePaul University
Fri, 01/23/2026 - 10:19
Description
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.
Characterization of group VI carbonyls with bidentate phosphines
Description
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.
1FLO: Addition of H2 to four-coordinate iridium
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
Chip Nataro / Lafayette College
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
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
Chip Nataro / Lafayette College
Mon, 07/07/2025 - 07:35
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.
COMFORT, A web resource for fragment molecular orbitals of simple fragments
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.