The UMD Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry cordially invites you to the

2025 Russell Marker Lecture in Organic Chemistry

with

John F. Hartwig
University of California, Berkeley and
Division of Chemical Sciences, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories, Berkeley

on

"Catalyzing Organic Synthesis"

Thursday, October 9, 2025
3:30 Reception
4-5 p.m. Lecture
Chemistry Building
Chemistry Great Hall (Room 1112)

If you have a question about this event, including disability accommodations, please contact Cathy Fisanich at cclark4@umd.edu or 301.405.1795

About the Talk
Our long-standing interest in cross coupling reactions to form carbon-heteroatom bonds has placed a particular focus on revealing the transition-metal chemistry in these processes. We have developed palladium, nickel, and copper complexes for these processes with a range of ligands bound to the metals. This lecture will provide background and latest developments with palladium catalysts as a prelude to present our latest mechanistic findings on reactions catalyzed by first-row metal complexes containing nickel and copper to form carbon-nitrogen and carbon-oxygen bonds. This lecture will place particular emphasis on the inventory of Cu(I) and Cu(II) complexes in cross coupling with Cu complexes and the rates of reductive elimination from nickel vs palladium complexes.

About the Speaker
John Hartwig currently holds the Dow Chair in Sustainable Chemistry after holding for 14 years the Henry Rapoport Chair in Organic Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on the discovery, development and mechanistic analysis of new reactions catalyzed by transition metal complexes, and he is well known for contributions to widely practiced cross-coupling chemistry that form aryl and allyl amines, ethers, sulfides, and carbonyl compounds, for hydroaminations of alkenes, for the discovery of practical C-H bond functionalization reactions of small molecules and of polyolefins and for creating artificial enzymes that enable laboratory chemistry to occur inside a protein, inside whole cells, and even inside biosynthetic pathways. On each of these topics, he has conducted detailed mechanistic analysis and revealed new elementary reactions of organotransition metal complexes. For this work, he has received the A.C. Cope Award, the ACS award in Organometallic Chemistry, the H.C. Brown Award for Synthetic Methods, the Wolf Prize in Chemistry, and the BBVA Foundation Award in the Basic Sciences, among other recognitions. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2012 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2015. He is the author of the textbook “Organotransition Metal Chemistry: From Bonding to Catalysis.”

About the Lecture
Established in 1988 by Russell E. Marker (B.S. '23, M.S. '24, chemistry), the annual Russell Marker Lecture in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of Maryland focuses on natural products chemistry. Marker was an award-winning chemist who invented the octane rating system for gasoline. He also developed a proprietary chemical process—known as Marker degradation—that led to numerous hormone therapies, including the birth control pill.