The Tolman Group works at the interfaces of inorganic, biological, and polymer chemistry to address important problems related to human health and the environment.

 

Tolman Group, October 2018. By rows: (front) Caitlin Bouchey, Justin Barry (2nd) Annie Luke, Appie Peterson (3rd) Courtney Elwell, Wilson Bailey, Bill Tolman (4th) Dimitar Shopov, Yilenda Dong, Hussnain Sajjad, Tedd Wiessner (5th) Yanay Popowsky, Timothy Zerk.

One aspect of the bioinorganic side of the Tolman lab focuses on modeling the active sites of copper based enzymes like LPMO using small molecules complexes to understand their structure and reactivity toward activating C-H bonds.

 

Our group is interested in modeling the coopertivity of multi-copper enzymatic sites using macrocyclic ligands.

Our group uses a wide array of spectroscopic and analytical techniques to determine the structure and function of complexes we synthesize.

The Tolman Lab is proud to be part of the Center for Sustainable Polymers! Check out the official CSP website.

The Tolman lab is committed to finding alternatives to petroleum sources for polyolefins. Using biomass, we’re working to decarbonylate fatty acids to 1-olefins in our drop-in strategy.

Our group analyses the kinetic mechanism of Ring Opening Transesterification Polymerizations (ROTEP) for bionewable monomers in order to gain a fundemental understanding of how the structure of our organometallic catalysts affect the dispersity and polymerization rate for these degradable polyesters.

We’d like to thank the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the US-Israeli Binational Science Foundation for funding our research.

WUSTL undergraduates: interested in doing research with us? Contact Prof. Tolman via email (wbtolman-at-wustl.edu)

Tolman Group Laboratory, Contact Information

  • Mailing Address: Washington University in St. Louis
    One Brookings Dr. 
    St. Louis, Missouri (MO) 63130
  • Phone: 314-935-6530
  • Fax: 314-935-4481

Department of Chemistry

Recent News and Publications

news

Welcome to new postdoctoral associate Dimitar Shopov!

Welcome to Dimitar, a new member of the lab who completed his Inorganic Chemistry PhD in 2018 at Yale University under Profs. Robert Crabtree and Gary Brudvig, studying the wonderful high oxidation state-stabilizing properties of pyridine-alkoxide ligands and resultant unique oxo-bridged iridium dimers. He is currently investigating the properties of bio-inspired reactive copper-oxygen species.