Next Generation Materials Scientists

Date

Speakers

12 October 2022
9:00 am to 10:30am
(SG Time)

Prof. John F. Hartwig
Department of Chemistry, University of California, Berkeley

Title: Polymer Upcycling by C-H Bond Functionalisation

Biography
Professor John F. Hartwig is the Henry Rapoport Chair in Organic Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley since 2011. Professor Hartwig's research focuses on the discovery and understanding of new reactions catalyzed by transition metal complexes. He has developed a selective catalytic functionalization of alkanes, a method for formation of arylamines and aryl ethers from aryl halides or sulfonates, a method for the direct conversion of carbonyl compounds to alpha-aryl carbonyl derivatives, a system for the catalytic addition of amines to vinylarenes and dienes, and highly selective catalysts for the regio and enantioselective amination of allylic carbonates. He has revealed several new classes of reductive eliminations, has isolated discrete compounds that functionalize alkanes, and has reported unusual three-coordinate arylpalladium complexes that are intermediates in cross coupling. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2012. Through his work, Prof. Hartwig has won numerous prestigious awards such as the 2015 Willard Gibbs Award, 2019 Wolf Prize in Chemistry and the 2021 Arthur C. Cope Award. 

Dr. Jason Lim
Soft Materials Department
Institute of Materials Research and Engineering (IMRE), A*STAR

Title: Upcycling Waste Plastics into Functional Materials

Biography
Dr. Jason Y.C. Lim obtained his PhD in Inorganic Chemistry (2017) from the University of Oxford in the UK, under the supervision of Prof. Paul D. Beer, and subsequently performed post-doctoral research with Prof. Charlotte K. Williams at the same institute. After his postdoctoral stint, Dr. Jason returned to Singapore as a scientist at the Institute of Materials Research and Engineering (IMRE) in Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR). He is the Group Leader of the Sustainable Supramolecular Materials Lab. In addition to being a group leader in IMRE, he also holds an Adjunct Assistant Professorship at the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, National University of Singapore. Dr. Jason’s research interests centre around sustainable catalysis, upcycling of waste plastics, biodegradable supramolecular biomaterials and metal-organic frameworks for sustainability-related applications. He is the World’s Top 2% Scientists 2020 in Organic Chemistry (Stanford University) and was awarded the Health and Biomedical Sciences Industry-Alignment Fund (Pre-positioning) in 2021.