Organic Chemistry Seminar
Aleksandr (Alex) V. Zhukhovitskiy was born in Dnipro, Ukraine and immigrated to the US at the age of 11. He completed his undergraduate studies in Chemistry, Mathematics, and the Integrated Science Program at Northwestern University, earning a joint BA/MS degree in Chemistry in 2011. From 2011 till 2016, Alex conducted doctoral research in the laboratory of Professor Jeremiah A. Johnson in the Department of Chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and from 2016 till 2019, carried out postdoctoral research in Professor F. Dean Toste’s group in the Department of Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2019, Alex started his research group in the Department of Chemistry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he is currently an Assistant Professor and William R. Kenan Jr. Faculty Fellow. Research in the Zhukhovitskiy group (www.zhukogroup.com) is focused on addressing fundamental challenges in polymer chemistry by implementing and advancing organic, inorganic, organometallic, and supramolecular chemistry methods. Applications of this research include polymer sustainability, tissue engineering, and solar energy capture and conversion. For his group’s work, Alex has been recognized with the Army Research Office, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Department of Energy, and National Science Foundation Early Career Awards, as well as the 3M Non-Tenured Faculty Award and the Thieme Chemistry Journals Award. Beyond research, another important mission embraced by the Zhukhovitskiy group is dissemination of polymer science education and cultivation of scientist identities in the broader community.
The polymer backbone is fundamental to the polymer's identity and properties. My seminar will focus on the development of metathesis mechanisms to access heteroatom-rich polymer backbones, new editing tools to transform existing polymer backbones into different ones, and both strategies and tactics to depolymerize commodity polymeric materials into valuable small molecules. Specifically, I will discuss iridium-guanidinate catalyzed ring-opening metathesis of cyclic carbodiimides and the current directions toward diazene metathesis, as well as an array of rearrangement transformations—including Ireland-Claisen and aza-Cope—applied to edit the backbones of polymers. Besides the focus on polymer backbones, retrosynthetic logic applied to polymeric materials will be another common thread woven throughout this seminar, as it is a central element of the research in the Zhukhovitskiy group.