By Wendy Plump
Department of Chemistry
Tuesday, Nov. 11, 2025

The functionalization of carbon–hydrogen (C-H) bonds so crucial to catalysis is a complex chemical process with many challenges. Improving its efficiency has huge ramifications for medicines, energy needs, and the sustainability of the nation’s products and technologies.

That goal has been at the heart of the Paul Chirik Lab’s nearly decade-long partnership with the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The funding seeks to enhance routes to C–H functionalization that advance organic synthesis.

This functionalization allows chemists to convert a specific C-H bond in a molecule—typically unreactive and useless to catalysis—into a more useful bond without undergoing numerous chemical steps. One of the biggest sustainability savings for a chemist is the elimination of steps in the lab that take time, reduce yield, generate waste, and cost more.

Chirik says the NIH partnership has been essential to his lab’s work.

“Great research costs money. It requires resources. The biggest resource we have is the support of the researchers – our postdocs and graduate students. You have to have people in the lab doing these experiments, making these molecules, making these discoveries,” says Chirik, the Edwards S. Sanford Professor of Chemistry. “Our partnership with the NIH allows us to attract the greatest scientists from around the country and around the world into our labs to do this work. Without it, it couldn’t be done.” …

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