Merging Organic Synthetic and Macromolecular Chemistry to Design Efficient Catalysts and Diverse Polymers

Transformative methods and strategies that merge organic synthesis and polymer chemistry are needed to address grand challenges with respect to achieving robust new materials. The Elacqua group’s research is Nature-inspired and founded on using polymer chemistry to address bottlenecks in organic synthesis, and using organic chemistry to confront challenges in polymer synthesis. Our group has pursued this goal through three main endeavors: (i) designing new methods toward the synthesis of sequence-defined polymers; (ii) investigating the role of confinement in photoredox catalysis; and (iii) upcycling abundant aromatics to afford new polymers.