Professor Raúl Hernández Sánchez (Rice University)

Title: Macrocyclic templates facilitating strong and weak interactions

Abstract: Macrocyclic arene compounds have played a fundamental role in the development of supramolecular chemistry. Research on these systems have laid the foundations to explore and establish non-covalent interactions, e.g., hydrogen bonding, π···π stacking, C–H···π interactions. My research group has taken the basic principles of macrocyclic arenes to design architectures enforcing metal–metal interactions towards the activation of small molecules, scaffolds capable of tubularly contorting aromatic systems, and frameworks to bind anionic species for environmental remediation, all while retaining their intrinsic non-covalent interactions. In this seminar, I will discuss our progress in each of these areas constantly crossing the boundaries between synthetic organic and inorganic chemistry, while inspired to develop novel materials.

Biography: Raúl joined the Chemistry faculty at Rice in the summer of 2022 and is the Norman Hackerman Welch Young Investigator Junior Chair. Prior to joining Rice, Raúl was an Assistant Professor from 2018 to 2022 in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Pittsburgh. He was born in Chihuahua City, México. During his undergraduate years Raúl worked intermittently as a research assistant in the laboratory of Prof. Sossina Haile (Caltech) in the Summers of 2007-09, and Spring of 2008. In Spring of 2009, he explored the formation of ionic membranes under the guidance of Prof. Beate Klösgen at the Southern University of Denmark. He received a B.Sc. in Chemistry from the Department of Chemistry at Monterrey Tec (Mexico) in 2010. He then moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts to pursue a Ph.D. in Chemistry at Harvard under the mentorship of Prof. Ted Betley. After completing his thesis on the Coordination Chemistry and Electronic Structure of Iron Clusters, he then moved to Columbia University as a Columbia Nano Initiative Postdoctoral Fellow to work under the supervision of Prof. Colin Nuckolls. At Rice University, his group's research interests lie at the interface between synthetic organic and inorganic chemistry to create catalysts capable of activating small molecules at polynuclear reaction sites, to develop methods to radially contort aromatic systems, and interested in the design of anion receptors for water remediation.