David H. Farrar Professor of Inorganic Chemistry Deputy Provost and Vice-Provost, Students Education B.Sc. (University of Toronto) M.Sc. (University of Toronto) Ph.D. (Western Ontario) Postdoctoral Research Fellow (Cambridge)

Research Interests My current research focuses on the synthesis and transition-metal co-ordination chemistry of phosphorus based ligands, and on the structure, reactivity and reaction mechanisms of transition-metal carbonyl complexes. Phosphorus has a central role in much of the work. The diversity of phosphorus chemistry and the importance of its compounds combine to create a rich and fertile area of chemical research. I am also interested in structure determination by single crystal X-ray crystallography. Our Nonius Kappa CCD diffractometer permits rapid data acquisition and facilitates the study of interesting structural problems. We have recently prepared a number of highly functionalised phosphane compounds with N-containing aromatic substituents. The introduction of 2-pyridinyl and 2-indolyl substituents onto phosphorus provides multidentate ligands capable of stabilizing diverse structures with metal atoms in a range of oxidation states. Organometallic compounds containing functionalised phosphanes are important for several reasons. The presence of another coordinating atom or atoms provides a diversity of coordination modes. Differences in dynamic behavior that are attributable to the relative weakness of binding of the second coordinating atom or group to the metal are important in leading to ligand "hemilability" and to controlled reactivity that is especially important in catalytic applications. These highly functionalised phosphane ligands also are suited to the assembly of multimetallic coordination compounds featuring highly symmetric, enforced geometries such as squares, triangles, rectangles and rigid rods. The research provides students with a broad training in the synthesis and spectroscopic characterization of inorganic compounds, and with detailed knowledge of the technique of single-crystal x-ray crystallography.