Joseph Merola

Research Interests

The study of organometallic chemistry, an area that bridges inorganic and organic disciplines, has found remarkable utility in many diverse applications. Organometallic compounds themselves, which consist of metals bonded to organic groups, can teach us a great deal about fundamental bonding properties. The effect that binding an organic group to a metal has on that organic fragment's reactivity can be exploited in developing new catalysts for organic reactions. In our group, we try to take advantage of many of these properties of organometallic systems to study fundamental reaction chemistry, and to design novel catalyst systems.  Lately, we have discovered that many of our compounds can play a very new role:  anti-microbials and anti-virals – a role that is desperately needed in our time.