C.F. Houghton Professor of Chemistry William D. Jones to Receive an ACS Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award
by Lois Gresh
The American Chemical Society (ACS) will award an Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award to University of Rochester C.F. Houghton Professor of Chemistry William D. Jones at its annual meeting in Washington D.C. in August 2009. One of the highest honors in Organic Chemistry, the Cope Scholar Award was founded in 1984 and consists of $5,000, as well as a $40,000 unrestricted grant to support his research team. Ten people receive the Cope Scholar Award each year.
Professor Jones is one of the leading organometallic chemists of his generation, and as cited by the ACS, has won the Award "for his fundamental studies of C-H and C-C bond activation, which have opened the door to exciting applications in synthesis and catalysis."
His discovery of rhodium complexes that react with carbon-hydrogen (C-H) bonds in simple unactivated alkanes in homogeneous solution at ambient temperatures is a major landmark in Organic Chemistry. In addition, his isotope labeling and isotope effect experiments mapped out the potential energy surface for the energetics of C-H bond activation, resulting in an understanding of both the kinetic and thermodynamic bases for activation of a wide variety of hydrocarbons. He has also published some of the first kinetic evidence for the formation of transient complexes formed between alkanes and metals during the activation of aliphatic C-H bonds.
Professor Jones has also made important contributions to the activation and functionalization of carbon-carbon (C-C) bonds. He has discovered examples of metal-catalyzed reactions of C-C bonds that include metathesis, hydrogenolysis, and carbonylation. Further, he has discovered metal complexes that can cleave aryl-cyanide and aryl-acetylide bonds, the former being a critical step in the DuPont process for making nylon. These studies have made Professor Jones one of the most respected investigators in the interdisciplinary area of Organic and Inorganic Chemistry. Jones is a major contributor to our understanding of how metals can be used to cleave the most stable bonds in organic molecules.
Jones has also worked on several other key problems involving metal-mediated cleavage of strong bonds, including carbon-sulfur (C-S) and carbon-fluorine (C-F) bonds. For example, C-S bond cleavage is a key reaction in desulfurization of fuels. Jones has developed a nickel hydride dimer that desulfurizes dibenzothiophene, one of the most intractable sulfur-containing impurities, to a nickel biphenyl derivative that undergoes hydrogenolysis to biphenyl with regeneration of the active Ni dimer. This work has the potential to lead to new, efficient desulfurization catalysts that may provide an important advance in Environmental Chemistry.
As for C-F bond activation of fluoroalkanes, Professor Jones has discovered that Cp*2ZrH2 is capable of cleaving a wide variety of aliphatic C-F bonds, generating Cp*2ZrHF and the reduced hydrocarbon. No other transition metal-based system has shown this type of reactivity.
Recently, Professor Jones has taken a leadership role in the new NSF Center for Enabling New Technologies through Catalysis (CENTC), which was awarded $15 million over the next 5 years and supports collaborative research among 15 principle investigators at 10 institutions. Jones is currently working on a collaborative project that explores non-platinum metal systems (Rh and Ir) for Shilov-type hydrocarbon activation and functionalization. Another collaborative project examines metal systems where electrochemical oxidation of a compound known to activate methane might permit nucleophilic attack/functionalization. This latter project has potential applications in a methane/methanol fuel cell.
Professor Jones won the ACS Award in Organometallic Chemistry in 2003 and has served as Associate Editor of the Journal of the American Chemical Society since 2003. He has published 163 professional articles and 7 book chapters, and he has given 324 lectures and presentations at universities, meetings, and corporations. He earned his BS in Chemistry from MIT in 1975, and he earned his PhD in Chemistry from the California Institute of Techology in 1979. He's been at the University of Rochester since 1980.
Along with Professor Jones, the other 2009 Cope Scholar Award Winners are Carlos F. Barbas III, Paul J. Chirik, Victor J. Hruby, Chaitan Khosla, Mohammad Movassaghi, Nicos A. Petasis, John A. Porco, Jr., David H. Sherman, and Erik J. Sorensen.