Research Interests
Fossil resources have abundantly supplied for our energy, fuel, material and consumer needs etc. over the last century. Concern over its dwindling supplies together with environmental impacts from its exorbitant use has resulted in a global hunt for alternate sustainable resources. The scientific community has thus been faced with the challenge of identifying suitable substitutes or replacements for our current petrochemical feedstock. While solar, wind, fuel cells etc. can help us meet our energy needs of the future, biomass being the source of renewable carbon atoms could supply for our chemical feedstock. However, biomass and biomass-derived being structurally, compositionally and functionally different from petrochemicals demand the development of alternate methods for their efficient utilization. From a synthetic chemist’s perspective, this calls for a paradigm shift in how we think about our starting materials, reagents, catalysts, solvents and so on.
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Our research group is developing methods for incorporating biomass-derived molecules in chemical processes.
Research in the group scours different inter-related aspects such as:
(a) developing synthetic methods that use renewables
(b) converting bio-derived molecules into platform chemicals
(c) developing sustainable plastics sourced from biomass
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The first two projects involve developing efficient transition-metal catalyzed processes thus offering cost-minimization and waste reduction and hence, adhere to the principles of ‘Green Chemistry’. Another frontier that is being explored is transforming platform chemicals obtained from biomass into value-added chemicals by engaging them in tandem reactions.
Funding
