Jitendra K Bera
IIT Kanpur
Jitendra Bera received Ph.D. from Indian IISc, Bangalore, in 1999. After a couple of postdoctoral stints, he joined the faculty at IIT Kanpur in 2003, where he is currently serving as Chair Professor. He is elected fellow of three National Science Academies of India and recipient of the J C Bose National Fellowship. His research in the field of organometallic chemistry has earned him several awards and recognitions, including the Outstanding Investigator Award by DAE, Swarnajayanti fellowship (2009) by DST and Silver medal (2020), and Bronze medal (2012) by the Chemical Research Society of India (CRSI). He received the C N R Rao National Prize (2018) in Chemical Sciences. He is currently serving as an Associate Editor - Applied Organometallic Chemistry (Wiley); Member: of the Editorial Advisory Board of Organometallics (ACS); Dalton Transactions (RSC). Bera's research interests span synthetic, structural, and mechanistic organometallic chemistry and address chemical synthesis's energy, environmental, and sustainability aspects. He was elected fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences in 2014.
Lectures by Fellows/Associates
Swapan K Ghosh, University of Mumbai, Mumbai
Water as a Reactant in Organometallic Catalysis
High O-H-bond dissociation energy and unfavourable thermodynamics render water a difficult reagent to be exploited in chemical reactions. Bringing a catalytically relevant water molecule from the bulk water to the vicinity of the metal center is one of the critical steps. A cooperating ligand compensates for the thermodynamic loss by H-bond interaction with the water molecule. Carefully designed ligand scaffolds, which hold the metal center and simultaneously offer an H-bond acceptor, have been devised for water activation and subsequent utilization in organic transformations. This talk discusses the hydration of nitriles and alkynes, olefin oxygenation, alcohol oxidation to acid, and oxidative deamination of primary amines using water.