John F. Hartwig

About

John F. Hartwig is the Henry Rapoport Chair in Organic Chemistry and a Professor of Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley. Born in 1964, he holds a B.A. from Princeton University and a Ph.D. in Chemistry from UC Berkeley. His postdoctoral work was conducted as an American Cancer Society Postdoctoral Associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Hartwig has held faculty positions at Yale University, where he served as Assistant, Associate, and then Irénée DuPont Professor of Chemistry, and at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, as Kenneth L. Rinehart Jr. Professor. Since 2011, he has been a faculty member at UC Berkeley, where he also holds the title of The Dow Chair in Sustainable Chemistry. His research focuses on the discovery and understanding of new reactions of organic compounds catalyzed by transition metal complexes and artificial metalloenzymes. His group investigates small-molecule catalysts and artificial metalloenzymes for selective reactions of organic molecules, including catalytic functionalization of alkanes and arenes, cross-couplings, fluorination, addition to alkenes, and hydrocarbyl functionalization. His work combines organic synthesis, organometallic synthesis, protein design, and mechanistic analysis, leading to the discovery of new classes of organometallic reactions. Hartwig has authored a leading textbook in organometallic chemistry titled 'Organotransition Metal Chemistry: From Bonding to Catalysis' and has received…

Research topics

• Chemistry
• Organic chemistry
• Materials science
• Combinatorial chemistry
• Stereochemistry
• Polymer chemistry

Selected publications

• Catalytic deconstruction of waste polyethylene with ethylene to form propylene

  Science · 2022 · 380 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  as an isomerization catalyst selectively degraded this unsaturated polymer to propylene in yields exceeding 80%. These results show promise for the application of mild catalysis to deconstruct otherwise stable polyolefins.

  DOI

• Diverse functionalization of strong alkyl C–H bonds by undirected borylation

  Science · 2020 · 215 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  The selective functionalization of strong, typically inert carbon-hydrogen (C-H) bonds in organic molecules is changing synthetic chemistry. However, the undirected functionalization of primary C-H bonds without competing functionalization of secondary C-H bonds is rare. The borylation of alkyl C-H bonds has occurred previously with this selectivity, but slow rates required the substrate to be the solvent or in large excess. We report an iridium catalyst ligated by 2-methylphenanthroline with ac…

  DOI

• Backbone editing and deconstruction of polyethylene by Beckmann rearrangement and hydrogenolysis

  Chemical Science · 2025-01-01 · 16 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  Polyethylene is the most widely produced commodity plastic and is used in many applications, including packaging, insulation, and medical devices. However, the inertness of polyethylene makes chemical recycling inefficient and challenging. We report the conversion of oxidized high-density and low-density polyethylene, formed by direct, catalytic oxidation, to polyamides by Beckmann rearrangement of the corresponding oximes. These polyamides have enhanced surface properties over those of unmodifi…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Asymmetric Amination of Unstrained C(sp³)–C(sp³) Bonds

  Journal of the American Chemical Society · 2024-10-16 · 15 citations

  articleOpen accessCorresponding

  ) bonds could be a powerful strategy to stereoselectively reconstruct the backbone of an organic compound, but such reactions are rare. Although allylic substitutions have been used frequently to construct C-C bonds by the cleavage of more reactive C-X bonds (X is usually an O atom of an ester) by transition metals, the reverse process that involves the replacement of a C-C bond with a C-heteroatom bond is rare and generally considered thermodynamically unfavorable. We show that an unstrained, i…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• An Air-Stable, Single-Component Iridium Precatalyst for the Borylation of C–H Bonds on Large to Miniaturized Scales

  Journal of the American Chemical Society · 2024-11-12 · 14 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  The functionalization of C–H bonds enables the modification of complex molecules, often with the intention of forming compound libraries. The borylation of aryl C–H bonds is a widely used class of C–H bond functionalization, and conventional catalyst systems for the borylation of C–H bonds consist of an iridium source and an N,N-ligand, in conjunction with pinacolborane, to form the active iridium(III) tris(boryl) catalyst. These multicomponent catalyst systems complicate borylation reactions at…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• Catalytic Enantioselective Allyic Amination and Etherification

  NSF · $202k · 2006–2008

• NIH Grant R01GM058108

  NIH · $5.5M · 2016

• Catalytic Functionalization of C-H Bonds with Main Group Reagents

  NIH · $979k · 2015–2020

Frequent coauthors

• Douglas S. Clark

  Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

  63 shared

• Christopher D. Incarvito

  53 shared

• James P. Stambuli

  AbbVie (United States)

  43 shared

• Charles Edwin Webster

  Mississippi State University

  40 shared

• Jay D. Keasling

  Joint BioEnergy Institute

  39 shared

• Jaclyn M. Murphy

  39 shared

• Marko Hapke

  Johannes Kepler University of Linz

  35 shared

• Christo S. Sevov

  34 shared

Labs

• Hartwig GroupPI

  Mechanistically driven discovery of catalytic reactions

Awards & honors

• Arthur C. Cope Award (2021)
• Clarivate Citation Laureate (2020)
• John Gamble Kirkwood Award (2020)
• Wolf Prize in Chemistry (2019)
• Tetrahedron Prize for Creativity in Organic Chemistry (2018)

Similar researchers at University of California, Berkeley

• Peidong Yangh-262
• Jennifer A. Doudnah-230
• Jeffrey R. Longh-189