Welcome to the virtual home of the Merola Research Group in the Department of Chemistry at Virginia Tech. Here, you can find out the latest information about my current research interests and my current teaching interests. If you would like more information about anything that you find on this page, please feel free to email me with your questions: Joseph Merola

My teaching interests are quite varied. I enjoy teaching everything from General Chemistry to a number of graduate level inorganic and organometallic courses. This semester, I am teaching a junior-senior level course on Descriptive Inorganic Chemistry. I am trying lots of different things this semester dealing with more writing in the course as well as an on-line discussion page. Visit my current web pages for Descriptive Inorganic Chemistry.

I recently spoke about my experiences in using various computer technology in the General Chemistry Class that I taught in the Spring of 1996. If you are interested in learning about those experiences, visit http://www.chem.vt.edu/chem-dept/merola/cause/CAUSE.html

At this year's IT '97 Instructional Technology Conference, I gave a talk on "Getting Started in Instructional Technology". You can view the slides I used for that talk here.

The study of organometallic chemistry, an area that bridges inorganic and organic disciplines, has found remarkable utility in many diverse applications. Organometallic compounds themselves, which consist of metals bonded to organic groups, can teach us a great deal about fundamental bonding properties. The effect that binding an organic group to a metal has on that organic fragment's reactivity can be exploited in developing new catalysts for organic reactions. When it is difficult to study the reaction of a molecule on a metal surface in a heterogeneous catalyst system, it may be possible to infer how the reaction is taking place by studying suitably designed organometallic compounds as models. In our group, we try to take advantage of many of these properties of organometallic systems to study fundamental reaction chemistry, to design novel catalyst systems, and to use organometallic compounds as precursors to more complex materials. The following are highlights of some of our research areas. (For a list of selected papers, click here.)

Breaking B-H, C-H, N-H, and O-H Bonds with Iridium

In many commercial catalyst systems, the addition of H2 to a metal followed by transfer to an unsaturated organic molecule is an important step. It would be a powerful addition to the arsenal of chemical reactions if catalysts could be developed that could add not only H-H but also B-H, C-H, N-H, and O-H to organic unsaturates. We have been exploring the fundamental chemistry of iridium with the goal of developing such catalysts. The first step toward realizing this goal was to find suitable iridium complexes that could add these bonds. In every case, we have demonstrated that we could indeed carry out such additions with the example of a C-H addition shown below.

The next step in this process is to find out what unusual chemistry the B, C, N, and O groups will have when bonded to the iridium. We are just scratching the surface of this work, but the potential for new and exciting chemistry is shown by the further reaction of the furan iridium complex.

A very exciting feature of this reaction is that an insertion into a metal-carbon bond has taken place in preference to insertion into a metal-hydrogen bond.

Metals are used as catalysts in a large number of chemical processes: olefin hydrogenation, olefin hydroformylation, and olefin polymerization, just to name a few. Currently all of these reactions are carried out in organic solvents. There is much incentive to convert these processes to ones that use more environmentally benign conditions. If new catalysts that operate in aqueous medium could be developed, then current processes that use enormous amounts of organic solvents could be replaced. We have found that iridium compounds with anionic groups may be used as catalysts in aqueous solution. For example, in the reaction shown below, the dihydrido-chloride iridium complex acts a catalyst for hydrogenation of alkynes and alkenes in water.

This reaction only takes place in water.