Karen Goldberg

Her most recent research focuses on catalysis, particularly on developing catalysts for oxidation, as well as the synthesis and activation of molecular oxygen.

This culminates into a goal to design more efficient, cheaper, and greener chemical products and fuels from a variety of feedstocks, such as alkanes.

Goldberg's research involves formation of alcohols from alkanes using platinum or other late metal catalysts, including ruthenium, iridium and rhodium.

It was then that her research group came up with idea of hydrogenation of esters and lactones to form alcohol using base-free metal-catalyzed complexes.

The catalyst that gave rise to a high yield of formate esters is a half-sandwich iridium bipyridine complex.

The same half-sandwich complexes of iridium and rhodium were used as competent catalysts to hydrogenate carboxylic acids under relatively mild conditions.

[8] Through the Center for Enabling New Technology through Catalysis (CENTC),[9] Goldberg also contributed to finding methods of activating strong bonds such as C-H, C-C, C-O, C-N, and N-H.

In one of her publications, she introduces a method to catalyze the hydroarylation of unactivated alkenes using Pt(II) complexes with unsymmetrical pyrrolide ligands.

Her further studies on using platinum-based catalysts for the reductive eliminations of alkane products have also included crystallography characterizations of platinum complexes and selected intermediates to determine the mechanism of such reactions.