Malononitrile is a readily available feedstock chemical distinguished by its high acidity and unusual electronic structure. Guided by a “Freedom of Choice” philosophy in reaction discovery, we are exploring this underutilized reagent as a platform for inventing new, often enantioselective, transformations with the potential to simplify access to sp3-rich drug-like molecules. This lecture will highlight historical milestones in malononitrile chemistry and describe reactions developed in our laboratory.

The Department of Chemistry will its annual alumni events this spring for alumni, faculty, students, and friends of the department. The series of events kicks off on Friday, April 17, with the Alumni Lecture at 4:00 PM followed by the Awards Banquet beginning at 5:30 PM. Two weeks later, the Alumni Golf Scramble will be held on Saturday, May 2 with a 1:00 PM start at the UGA Golf Course.

One of the major focuses of solid-state chemistry is properties-structure relation. Geometrical frustration is an intriguing structural property which can lead to various quantum phenomena. On one hand, geometrical frustration suppresses long-range magnetic ordering in systems with localized magnetic moments and leads to exotic quantum states, such as quantum spin liquid.

Structurally complex charge-balanced polar intermetallic compounds, such as Zintl pnictides (i.e., those containing Group 15 elements) and heteroanionic pnictide oxides, are promising candidates for advancing thermoelectric technology.

Local pair natural orbital coupled-cluster methods have seen much success recently, allowing for the application of “chemically accurate” approaches such as CCSD(T) to significantly larger systems. Notably, the DLPNO-CCSD(T) approach of Professor Frank Neese and coworkers has been utilized to run computations on whole proteins such as crambin (636 atoms) and insulin (789 atoms). At the CCSD(T) level of theory, local approximations have errors which are controllable to within 0.25 kcal/mol through tight parameters.