Matt Whited is an inorganic chemistry professor at Carleton College, and he is also a Davidson College grad from 2004. I’ll be honest that we hadn’t crossed paths until I was looking through the ionicviper.org for ideas to incorporate into my Organometallics course last Spring. I happened upon his migratory insertion laboratory lesson, which is a three-experiment series covering the synthesis of several organometallic moly complexes.
In those materials and among his papers, I noticed he was still expanding the set of phosphines that would induce migratory insertion. Having just read some papers about the PTA ligand, I was curious about whether it might work similarly. We exchanged a few emails, and we were off to the races.
The students did a bunch of work, I mailed out some crystals over the following summer, and we received some very high quality data that is presented in the paper (written by Matt).
Check out the paper here.
