Chemical Society Seminar: Mario Leclerc: Green Chemistry for Green Energy

Abstract:

The utilization of conjugated polymers as active materials in organic electronic devices is severely restricted by the synthetic procedures used to prepare such polymers. For the most part, conjugated polymers are prepared via Migita-Stille and Miyaura-Suzuki cross-coupling techniques, which require expensive and/or toxic organometallic intermediates. Direct (hetero)arylation polymerization (DHAP) makes accessible the synthesis of such materials through palladium-catalysed C-H activation, thereby avoiding many of the setbacks of other polymerization techniques. This reaction has been improved greatly over the last few years and can now be used to prepare some of the most highly-performing organic electronic materials reported in the literature. We will review in this lecture recent advances for the preparation of conjugated polymers and their utilization in plastic solar cells.

Bio:

Mario Leclerc was awarded a Ph.D. in chemistry from Université Laval, Quebec City, Canada, in 1987, under the guidance of Prof. R.E. Prud’homme. After a short post-doctoral stay at INRS-Energie et Matériaux near Montréal with Prof. L.H. Dao, he joined the Max-Planck-Institute for Polymer Research, in Mainz, Germany, as a post-doctoral fellow in the research group of Prof. G. Wegner. In 1989, he accepted a position of professor in the department of chemistry at the Université de Montréal. He returned to Université Laval in 1998. Since 2001, he has held a Canada Research Chair on Electroactive and Photoactive Polymers. He is the author or co-author of 300 publications which have already received more than 48 000 citations (h-index of 105). His current research activities include the development of new building blocks and polymerization methods (e.g. direct heteroarylation) for applications in organic electronics.