Dr. Claudio Verani
Wayne State University

Bio-inspired Complexes of Phenol-containing Ligands: From Soft Materials to Ground-state Switches

Abstract:

Current progress on two ongoing projects is discussed. We will show how the bioinorganic principles of modeling and mimicking can be used in the development of novel soft materials. In the first part, the use of archetypical compounds to model the geometric and physical properties of a cobalt-containing species with mesogeninc properties will be discussed. In the second part we discuss the use of ligand design to mimic geometries observed in enzymes, thus leading to more stable redox-driven switching mechanisms.

Biography:

Claudio Verani obtained his M.Sc. in Inorganic Chemistry with Ademir Neves (1996, honors) at the Federal University of Santa Catarina, Brazil. His PhD came from the Wieghardt Group at the Max-Plank Institute for Radiation Chemistry and the Ruhr-University Bochum (2000, Germany), developing multimetallic models of bioinorganic relevance.

Dr. Verani worked as a Post-Doctoral researcher modeling Citochrome-c-oxidase in the Karlin Group, at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD.

Dr. Verani joined Wayne State University as assistant professor of Chemistry in September 2002. His main interests involve the use of coordination chemistry to the development of metal-containing soft materials in bulk and on surfaces. His group utilizes several techniques, from synthesis, to spectroscopy, electrochemistry, magnetism, mesogenicity, amphiphilicity, surface deposition, and computational calculations. Many of these techniques are performed in collaboration with other groups.