Robert Flowers Fall 2015

gave a Keynote Lecture at the IUPAC Conference on Physical Organic Chemistry entitled: “Unraveling the Mechanism of Single-Electron Reduction and Oxidation in Synthetic Reactions.” He also gave lectures at University of Michigan and Wayne State University in October entitled: “Give or Take and Electron. Mechanistic Studies of Single Electron Transfer in Synthetically Important Reactions.” Flowers was also an invited speaker in China this past spring and gave lectures on his research at the Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry, Hangzhou University, Beijing University, and Tsinghua University. His group gave four lectures at the National meeting of the American Chemical Society: "Detecting Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms in DNA Duplexes Using Backscattering Interferometry", Gaby Haddad; "On the Mechanism of Silver-Catalyzed Decarboxylative Fluorination:, Niki Patel (PhD 2015); "Elucidating the Role of SmI2-Water and Glycol in Reductions: Mechanistic Studies of Anthracene Reduction", Tesia Chciuk; "Radical Arylation of Epoxides by Low-Valent Titanocene Complexes: Mechanistic Studies and Methodology Development", Godfred Fianu. His group published six papers during the past academic year: “Solvent-Dependent Substrate Reduction by [Sm{N (SiMe3)2}2(THF)2]. An Alternative Approach for Accelerating the Rate of Substrate Reduction by Sm(II)” in the J. Org. Chem., “Kinetic and Mechanistic Properties of fac-Ir(ppy)3-catalyzed Redox Neutral Coupling of Alkyl Halides and Arenes: The Fate of the Photocatalyst” a collaboration with the group of Corey Stephenson at the University of Michigan in Chem. Sci., “Mechanistic Study of the Titanocene(III)- Catalyzed Radical Arylation of Epoxides” a collaboration with the group of Andreas Gansäuer at the University of Bonn in Chemistry, A European Journal, “Expedient and Highly Diastereoselective Synthesis of 2 (2-Hydroxyethyl) bicyclo[2.1.1]hexan-1-ols via Allylsamarium BromideMediated Cascade Double-cyclization” a collaboration with the group of Xiaoxia Wang at Zhejiang Normal University in the J. Org. Chem., “Mechanistic Study of the Samarium Diiodide - N,N-dimethyl-2-aminoethanol Reducing System” in a special issue of Tetrahedron Letters in honor of Professor Harry Wasserman, “Titanocenium(III) Complexes for Catalysis in Single Electron Steps” a collaboration with the group of Andreas Gansäuer at the University of Bonn in Angew. Chem., Int. Ed., and “The Mechanism of Silver-Catalyzed Decarboxylative Fluorination” in the J. Org. Chem.