Having given his trial lecture on “Machine learning in computational chemistry” in the morning, Lluís Suàrez' defended his dissertation «Computational study on the deaminative hydrogenation of amides catalyzed by base metal complexes» in the afternoon on May 19 2021 at the Hylleraas Centre in Oslo. The committee consisted of Prof. Stuart Alan Macgregor, Institute of Chemical Sciences, Heriot - Watt University Edinburgh, Scotland, UK, Dr. Maria Besora Department of Physical and Inorganic Chemistry, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona, Spain and Dr. Erik Tellgren, Department of Chemistry, University of Oslo. The event was held on line, but a number of members were present at the centre during defences and met afterwards for an informal celebration in "Onsager", the kitchen of the Hylleraas Centre.
Lluís Suàrez' work was supervised by Dr. Ainara Nova, Prof. Mats Tilset, and Dr. David Balcells from the Hylleraas Centre for Quantum Molecular Sciences.
Popular scientific abstract:
Catalytic hydrogenation of amides could be an excellent option for the green atom efficient formation of alcohols and amines. However, the low reactivity of amides has been a big drawback for this reaction. In the last decade, the emergence of bifunctional catalysts for hydrogenation reactions improved the conditions for amide hydrogenation and made them feasible on larger scales. Still, the reaction mechanisms remained underinvestigated. In the course of his PhD studies, the candidate has elucidated the reaction mechanisms and bottlenecks by computational simulations at a quantum scale. With that information, the candidate proposed new catalysts that avoided such bottlenecks. Later, experimental studies proved the increased performance of the predicted catalysts.