VT College of Science Quarterly August 2014 Vol. 2 No. 1 | Page 19

Shuhai Xiao, professor of
geobiology, delivered the
59th Sir Albert Charles
Seward Memorial Lecture
at the Birbal Sahni
Institute of Paleobotany
in Lucknow, India Jan.
15. The lecture audience
of about 150 included
the regional director of
the Geological Survey of
India and a former vice
chancellor of Lucknow
University.
Seward was the Professor
of Botany at Cambridge
University from1906
to 1936, a Fellow of
the Royal Society, and
mentor of Birbal Sahni,
FRS, who founded the
institute. It is the only one
of its kind in the world
de dicated to paleobotany.
In the photo, Shuhai
lights a lamp as part of
the ceremony before the
public lecture.

Copper boryl complexes at heart
of three-nation $950,000 grant
The National Science Foundation, along with the National
Science Foundation of China,
and the German Deutsche
Forschungsgemeinschaft,
have recently awarded a
multi-national group, including Webster Santos, associate
professor and Blackwood Junior
Faculty Fellow of Life Sciences
in chemistry, a three year grant
worth $950,000 to examine the
reactivity and application of
copper boryl complexes.
The research to develop novel
catalyst systems that replace
rare, expensive, and toxic transition metal catalysts, with earth

Webster Santos

abundant metals such as copper, is being conducted in collaboration
with Todd Marder, Universitat Wurzburg, Germany, and Yao Fu, University of Science and Technology, China. The three groups will combine
their separate areas of expertise to provide more sustainable, synthetic
methods for the production of commodity chemicals.
Copper boryl complexes install boron in molecules, making them good
intermediates to generate more elaborate chemicals used in medicine,
electronics, and other materials. These organoboron compounds provide the capability to make bond formations that are otherwise impossible to achieve.
“These complexes can also capture carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas,
so methods that use carbon dioxide as a reagent to make commodity
chemicals are extremely valuable,” Santos said.
Santos received his bachelor’s degree and Ph.D. from the University of
Virginia. His postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University from 2002
to 2006 was funded by a National Research Service Award from the
National Institutes of Health.
FEBRUARY 2014

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