introduction

The inorganic chemistry in the Meyer laboratory bridges the field of classical coordination chemistry with fields of supramolecular, organometallic, and bioinorganic chemistry. The general research focuses on the organic synthesis of new chelating ligands and their transition and actinide metal coordination complexes. These complexes often exhibit unprecedented coordination modes and unusual electronic structures and consequently, enhanced reactivities towards small molecules, such as organic azides and O2, O3, CO, CO2, NO, N2O etc. Small molecule activation and atom or group transformation to functionalize important organic precursor molecules is envisioned. The coordination chemistry of a range of early transition metals as well as the relatively unexplored uranium chemistry is investigated. A battery of spectroscopic methods such as EPR, Mössbauer, electronic absorption, and MCD spectroscopy is applied to study the electronic properties and reactivities of these new species. Synthetic chemistry is at the heart of our research but modern computational methods (geometry optimization and electronic structure calculation with the ADF program suite) is applied to elucidate the electronic structures and origin of reactivity of our newly synthesized molecules.

In general, the research in our laboratories allows for learning a variety of inorganic and organic synthetic techniques as well as the theory and application of a large number of spectroscopic and computational methods.