David Vicic wins American Chemical Society Award for Creative Work in Fluorine Chemistry

David Vicic, the Howard S. Bunn Distinguished Professor of Chemistry at Lehigh, has been selected to receive the 2025 American Chemical Society (ACS) Award for Creative Work in Fluorine Chemistry.

The international award, which recognizes outstanding contributions to the advancement of fluorine chemistry, is given once annually.

Vicic has co-authored 105 peer-reviewed manuscripts, and his research helped provide the conceptual framework for understanding how earth-abundant metals could be used to introduce small fluorinated functional groups into larger organic molecules.

A building block approach that involved pairing the fluorinated groups with earth-abundant metals to make a more reactive chemical species was optimized so the fluorocarbon transfer was more reliable. Vicic showed it was possible to prepare and bottle a variety of activated and well-defined fluoro-organometallic complexes with metals such as copper, nickel, and cobalt, and study how they give up their fluorinated group to organic substrates.

Vicic's work demonstrates how the metal identity, the metal oxidation state and the ligand framework all play a role in tuning the chemistry to specific needs.

The reactivity patterns identified by Vicic guided the development of new synthetic methodologies of interest to industry. One of Vicic's fluorinated reagents has recently drawn the interest of Pfizer, who paired up with Snapdragonto synthesize it on a greater than 100 gram-scale using a continuous stirred tank reactor.

Vicic first became interested in fluorine chemistry when attending an Organic Reactions & Processes Gordon Research Conference. He noticed that the attendees from industry were very interested in the chemistry of small fluorinated groups, and he was intrigued by the fact these groups could not be manipulated in the same way as their non-fluorinated counter-parts.

Using his background in organometallic chemistry, his team carefully analyzed some recipes in the literature that used copper for transferring a trifluoromethyl group. By employing a key ligand, Vicic was able to show that you could prepare and isolate well-defined copper-trifluoromethyl complexes and use these pre-formed fluoro-organometallic species more reliably for trifluoromethylation reactions.

Vicic has since developed similar fluoro-organometallic chemistry with other earth-abundant metals, which has facilitated meaningful structural, electronic, and reactivity studies across metals in the first row of the Periodic Table. Vicic's current effortsare focused on using metal catalysts to understand how to repurpose high-global-warming-potential fluorinated refrigerants.

The ACS Award for Creative Work in Fluorine Chemistry address will be presented at the 2025 Winter Fluorine Conference in Clearwater, Florida.

For more information about the 2025 ACS National Award winners, click here.

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