Aryne Aminohalogenation

Abstract

This UROP project is a portion of a larger aryne aminohalogenation project, which I started Spring semester 2023, and plan on continuing into Fall semester 2023. I’m lucky to work in the Roberts group, which specializes in organometallic and catalytic chemistry, under the mentorship of a fourth year graduate student, Josh Gavin. Our collaborative research project studies a reaction method in which two functional groups are added to an aryne, a highly reactive intermediate molecule (figure 1). Achieving synthetically useful difunctionalization (as opposed to a reaction adding only a single function group) is an appealing prospect, especially in the fields like medicinal chemistry where large quantities of the target molecule need to be made; at such a scale additional steps are costly and increasingly difficult