Exploring New Facets of Organic Synthesis: From Metal to Metal-Free Catalysis

The Department of Chemistry of The Bhawanipur Education Society College organized a National Webinar on the topic “Exploring New Facets of Organic Synthesis: from Metal to Metal-Free Catalysis”. This National webinar was held on July 18, 2020 from 11 AM to 12.30 PM and Google Meet platform was used for the webinar. In the inaugural session, welcome address was given by Dr. Samir Siddhanta, Associate Professor, Department of Chemistry, The BES College, Kolkata. He explained the current need of modern organic synthesis using a metal containing catalyst and metal free catalyst.

The technical session was covered by our resource person Dr. Chinmoy Kumar Hazra from Department of Chemistry, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, India. The distinguished resource person enriched all with the four modern topics of interest. The first part of the webinar highlighted the catalytic generation of silicon based copper-(I) reagents from silicon pronucleophiles and the synthetic application of the methodologies and the synthesis of new materials. The second part of the talk was focused on the development of a mild and robust direct C–H functionalization strategy to the synthesis of axially chiral biaryls at ambient temperature with catalytic amount of Pd(OAc)2. The third part of the talk consisted of metal-free processes. In this part, a facile transformation of furans into silicon functionalized synthetic intermediates, by tris(pentafluorophenyl)borane-catalyzed cascade hydrosilylation processes under transition metal-free conditions were discussed. The last part of the talk was on COVID-19 related issues and the related inventions made by the various reputed institutions of India to fight against this particular disease.

After the technical session several questions/queries were received from the valued participants in the comment box of the Google meet and our speaker communicated those queries with proper explanations. The moderator of this question-answer session was Dr. Pinki Saha Sardar, one of the convenors of the webinar. At the end of the webinar Dr. Samir Kant Dutta, Vice-Principal (Science) delivered his viewpoint about the significance of the webinar. The students, Research Scholars and the faculties from various Premier Institutions of India participated in the webinar. The total numbers of active participants were 120. Valuable Feedback was received from the participants through online process followed by sending an E-certificate of participation to the participants. This National webinar completed with the enormous accomplishment from the students, Research Scholars and Faculty of various Institutions of all over India for strengthening their knowledge in the application area of the synthetic Chemistry.