T he Hagadorn group is focused on developing new approaches to transition metal-mediated processes of relevance to bioinorganic and organometallic chemistry. Exploring these processes will lead to a better understanding of metalloenzyme mechanism and spectroscopy as well as new types of catalysts and reagents for small-molecule transformations.
Functional mimics are particularly rare when one is considering multielectron redox reactions.
This shortcoming limits our chemical understanding of many fundamentally important and novel processes. Moreover, the design and application of homogeneous catalysts and reagents suffer as a consequence. This situation has inspired many chemists to pursue functional models of enzymes with varying degrees of success. This approach has worked very well for heme models and a handful of other examples. It has become clear, however, that additional features will need to be incorporated into models for a more complete mimicking of biological processes.