At the symposium “Sustainable Future: Dream Reactions with (and without) Hydrogen”, which took place on the 24.08.2023 in Münster, Martina A. Pogany received a price for her poster entitled “Hydride-Free Mechanism in the Electrocatalytic Semihydrogenation of Alkynes with Nickel Complexes”. Martina A. Pogany is a Master’s student at Heidelberg University and currently performs her Master thesis in the Organometallic Electrocatalysis team of Dr. Nicolas Kaeffer within the Molecular Catalysis department (Prof. Walter Leitner) at MPI-CEC.
“I am very grateful that I had the opportunity as a Master’s student to both work on this interesting topic as well as to take part at the symposium with my first poster. The great atmosphere during the whole event and the engaging discussions made me forget my initial nervousness. Nevertheless, receiving an award at the end surprised me a lot“, explains Martina Pogany. Her poster presented a recently disclosed investigation on the mechanism of molecular electrocatalytic semihydrogenation of alkynes, a work to which she contributed as part of her Master thesis. This study, through extensive stoichiometric, electrochemical and computational investigations, highlights that a hydride-free mechanism is the most favored one in alkyne semihydrogenation electrocatalysed by nickel-bipyridine complexes and proceeds via substrate coordination at the Ni centre followed by proton and electron transfers.1
About the symposium
The symposium “Sustainable Future: Dream Reactions with (and without) Hydrogen” was organized at the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster by Prof. Frank Glorius and sponsored by the European Research Council. The symposium aimed at bringing together scientists from different fields working on efficient synthesis (including (non) target-oriented synthesis, use of renewable feedstocks and recycling), to foster scientific exchange and new solutions.
1 G. Durin, M-Y. Lee, M. A. Pogany, T. Weyhermüller, N. Kaeffer, W. Leitner, J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2023, 145 (31), 17103-17111.