Eugene Khaskin

I received my BSc from my hometown university, the Simon Fraser University in Canada, in 2003. Later I joined the Vedernikov group at the University of Maryland in College Park and received my PhD in 2009 on CH activation and aerobic oxidation of Pt complexes. Later in 2009 I moved to Israel to join the Milstein group as a Marie Curie fellow doing research on Ru and Co based complex reactivity and catalysis. After a stint at the Volcani Institute in the Poverenov group (materials science) I returned to the Weizmann in 2014 for about 8 months until coming to OIST.

At OIST I'm a PI (not a professor) and that means I mostly work with interns, visiting scientists, and sometimes a researcher if the funding situation allows. The lab is equipped with two fume-hoods with Schlenk lines and a glove box, with access to NMR and X-Ray. As the lab is located together together with the Khusnutdinova unit, another organometallics lab with which I collaborate a lot, we have access to a solvent purification system, GC/MS, GC/FID, UV/VIS, IR-ATR, and a range of other common laboratory instruments. (see the following https://groups.oist.jp/cccu/equipment)

My current research interests are in Organometallics and Homogenous Catalysis. I synthesize or attempt to synthesize new types of ligands for a wide variety of transition metals. Some of the new ligands are very bulky and can stabilize reactive first row metal oxidation states, which have been explored as part of a collaboration in the activation of small molecules. For the catalytic chemistry, I try to focus on new types of reactions that have not appeared in the literature previously or are basically impractical (low turn-over number; difficult to make catalyst) as described. This has led to some success in ester metathesis and a novel type of cyclopronaton of aliphatic alcohols. A collaboration with a neuroscience colleague at OIST involves the organic synthesis of fluorescent dyes, though even there one of my reactions is used to skip an oxidation step.

The details of my chemistry experience before OIST, as well as my current research, are described under the links in the menu to the right. Contact: eugenekhaskin [at] oist.jp