Sundargopal Ghosh
IIT, Chennai
Sundargopal Ghosh is a Professor at the Department of Chemistry, IIT Madras. He received his BSc and MSc from the University of Calcutta and PhD from IIT Bombay in 1998. He joined the Department of Chemistry at IIT Madras in 2005, following a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Notre Dame, USA. His research interests are transition metal-boron compounds and their applications in catalysis and small molecule activation, and he has over 272 scientific publications in internationally acclaimed journals. He is a recipient of many awards, including the Professor Priyadaranjan Ray Memorial Award (2019), the Institute Research and Development Award of IIT Madras (2014), and the Bronze Medal of the Chemical Research Society of India (CRSI) (2013). He has supervised 29 PhD students, was an editorial board member of Organometallics (ACS, 2018-2020) and is currently the Editor of Inorganica ChimicaActa. He is an elected Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences (2017) and the National Academy of Sciences (India).
Session 1D - Lectures by Fellows and Associates
Shridhar R Gadre, Honorary Distinguished Professor, SPP University, Pune
Coordination chemistry of diborane(4) and diborane(6)
The fascinating aspect of metallaborane chemistry is that several classic organometallic complexes that define fundamental structural and bonding paradigms are mimicked by many isoelectronic metallaborane analogues. In this connection, diborane compounds not only mimic several classic organometallic compounds, but they have also been extensively explored for a broad understanding of chemical bonding and catalysis. For example, we have recently synthesised and structurally characterised a bimetallic diborane(4), which mimics Cotton's dimolybdenum-alkyne complex [{CpMo(CO)2},C2H2]. Also, we have isolated the first classical diborane(5) [B2H5], in which the sp2-B centre is stabilised by the electron donation from tantalum. Very recently, we have developed an uncatalysed synthetic pathway to generate the doubly base stabilised symmetrical and unsymmetrical diborane(4) species from the thermolysis reaction of 2-mercaptopyridine with [BH3•THF]. The key results ofthis work will be described in the talk.