Research Sketch

Our research interests are focused on the development of Earth-abundant transition metal complexes for the selective catalytic cleavage and formation of C-H, C-C, C-O, and C-N bonds from readily available organic starting materials. Special emphasis is placed on sp2-hybridized prochiral centers because of the mechanistic insights gained from the chemo-, regio-, and stereochemical outcomes. As a primarily undergraduate research laboratory, we are interested in collaborative partnerships with CCHF faculty members who develop new organometallic methodologies that are

(1) experimentally robust,

(2) highly selective and efficient, and

(3) minimize waste and safety hazards.

As a NDCR member, the research and educational goals of our group is to identify a synergistic and mutualistic collaboration with a CCHF faculty member that will recruit and retain students, particularly underrepresented groups, through manageable and careful project design. In particular, we are interested a collaborative project that can be divided into manageable pieces for students to be trained and generate preliminary/ongoing data in my research group. Students will then extend their research projects at the CCHF faculty member’s home institution for advanced summer undergraduate research training using state-of-the-art instrumentation and automation not readily available in our laboratory. Historically, our research group and collaborative partnerships have yielded an ACS Seed Scholar and several students admitted to chemistry and biological science Ph.D. program. Our interests are two-fold; we successfully build student’s self-confidence as a method to develop chemical solutions for complex synthetic problems.

Biography

Michael G. Coleman, Ph.D. is a native of Rochester, New York. He received his B.S. in Chemistry from the University at Buffalo in 1998. After serving four years as a laboratory technician at the Research and Development division of Praxair, Inc, he returned to the University at Buffalo and he received his Ph.D. in Synthetic Medicinal Chemistry. In 2007, he held a brief appointment as an Assistant Professor of Chemistry at South Carolina State University, and shortly thereafter, he occupied a NSF Visiting Scholar position at the University of Cincinnati’s Department of Chemistry. He later joined the faculty at the Rochester Institute of Technology in 2008 as a Visiting Professor and was later promoted to Assistant Professor in 2010. From 2011 – 2012, he occupied a joint position as Research Assistant at the Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory in central Long Island. Currently, he is an Associate Professor of Chemistry at the Rochester Institute of Technology.