Todd Hudnall, an associate professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Texas State University, has been awarded a three-year, $195,000 grant from the Welch Foundation to develop methods to synthesize and prepare diborylcarbenes, an exotic form of carbon.
Carbenes are highly reactive molecules and generally unstable outside of laboratory conditions. Diborylcarbenes are a particularly intriguing class of carbenes for researchers, as they are electrophilic—that is, they accept electron pairs—making them potentially useful in the exploration of new frontiers in fundamental chemistry.
"Diborylcarbenes are molecules that have been studied computationally and been theorized about since the 1960s," Hudnall explained. "People have tried to prepare them since the 1960s but haven't really been successful. We're developing new strategies based on more current chemistry that has evolved over the last two decades or so."
