Chemistry Faculty:
R. Bruce King, Ph.D.
Regents Professor
Phone: 706-542-1901
E-mail: rbking@sunchem.chem.uga.edu
Biographical Information
Professor King received his B.A. from Oberlin College in 1957 and his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1961. He spent one year at du Pont and four years at the Mellon Institute before joining the faculty in 1966. He was an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow from 1967 to 1971, a NATO Senior Fellow in 1978, and a Japan Society for Promotion of Science Fellow in 1981 as well as the 1971 recipient of the American Chemical Society Award in Pure Chemistry and the 1991 recipient of the American Chemical Society award in Inorganic Chemistry. His current research interests are in computational, theoretical, and mathematical inorganic chemistry.
Research Interests
Prof. King’s current research uses computational methods as well as the underlying theory and mathematics to understand the structure and bonding in unusual inorganic compounds, particularly those exhibiting three-dimensional aromaticity such as polyhedral boranes and metal clusters of various types. His computational work involves collaboration with three research groups. Thus he works with Prof. Schaefer at the University of Georgia on the structure and bonding in unsaturated metal carbonyl and metallocene derivatives. In addition he works with Prof. Schleyer, also of the University of Georgia, on the magnetic properties of inorganic ring and cluster compounds using nuclear independent chemical shift methods, both applied to the whole molecule and to individual molecular orbitals. Prof. King also collaborates with Prof. Ioan Silaghi-Dumitrescu of Babes-Bolyai University of Cluj-Napoca, Romania, on metal cluster and metallacyclobutadiene derivatives using density functional computational methods.
Publications
King, R. B.; Heine, T.; Corminboeuf, C.; Schleyer, P. v. R., “Antiaromaticity
in Bare Deltahedral Silicon Clusters Satisfying Wade’s and Hirsch’s
Rules: An Apparent Correlation of Antiaromaticity with High Symmetry,”
J. Am. Chem. Soc., 2004, 126, 430–431.
Xie, Y.; Schaefer, H. F., III; King, R. B., “The Dichotomy of Metallocenes:
Coaxial versus Perpendicular Dimetal Units in Sandwich Compounds,”
J. Am. Chem. Soc., 2005, 127, 2818–2819.
King, R. B.; Silaghi-Dumitrescu, I.; Lupan, A., “Density Functional
Theory Study of Eleven-Atom Germanium Clusters: Effect of Electron Count
on Cluster Geometry,” Inorg. Chem., 2005,
44, 3579–3588.