Dr Amit Kumar
Leverhulme Early Career Fellow
Biography
Amit completed his Integrated M.Sc. Chemistry (2007-2012) from the Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee where he was awarded the Institute Silver Medal for academic excellence and won several fellowships/research awards by DAAD, IIT-ParisTech, KVPY and INSPIRE (Govt of India) and Indian Academy of Science. He then won the prestigious Rhodes Scholarship for his DPhil research at the University of Oxford (Balliol College). During his DPhil (2012-2016) he worked under the guidance of Prof. Andrew Weller in the area of synthetic organometallic chemistry and developed rhodium and iridium catalysts for the dehydrocoupling of amine-boranes. After completing his DPhil studies, Dr. Kumar was awarded the PBC (Planning and Budgeting Committee, Israel, 2016-2019) fellowship to work with Prof. David Milstein at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel where he was promoted to be the Senior Postdoc Fellow in 2019. In the Milstein research group Dr. Kumar developed new pincer catalysts for small molecule activation and for the development of green and sustainable homogeneous catalysis based on dehydrogenation and hydrogenation reactions. Amit was awarded the FGS (Feinberg Graduate School) Prize for the outstanding achievements in postdoctoral research 2018 by the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel. Dr. Amit Kumar is currently a Leverhulme Trust Early Career fellow at the School of Chemistry, University of St. Andrews where he is working on the development of green catalytic reactions and hydrogen storage materials.
Research areas
Catalysis plays a major role in the production of food, pharmaceuticals and energy. Kumar Resarch Laboratory (KuRLa) is striving in the area of green homogeneous catalysis. The lab is focussed to develop new environmentally-benign and sustainable catalytic processes for the production of industrially useful chemicals from the cheap and inexpensive starting materials using pincer complexes. A significant effort is also being made to develop new chemical hydrogen storgae materials, preferrably liquid of high gravimetric storage capacity for which both dehydrogenation and hydrogenation (of the spent fuel) processes are facile.
For more information see the group website: https://kumarresearchlab.com/
Selected publications
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Hydrogenative depolymerization of nylons
Kumar, A., von Wolff, N., Rauch, M., Zou, Y-Q., Shmul, G., Ben-David, Y., Leitus, G., Avram, L. & Milstein, D., 11 Aug 2020, In : Journal of the American Chemical Society. Articles ASAP, 9 p.Research output: Contribution to journal ? Article
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Manganese catalyzed selective hydrogenation of cyclic imides to diols and amines
Das, U. K., Janes, T., Kumar, A. & Milstein, D., 21 May 2020, In : Green Chemistry. 22, 10, p. 3079-3082Research output: Contribution to journal ? Article
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Metal-ligand cooperation facilitates bond activation and catalytic hydrogenation with zinc pincer complexes
Rauch, M., Kar, S., Kumar, A., Avram, L., Shimon, L. J. W. & Milstein, D., 28 Jul 2020, In : Journal of the American Chemical Society. In pressResearch output: Contribution to journal ? Article
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Redox noninnocent nature of acridine-based Pincer complexes of 3d metals and C?C bond formation
Daw, P., Kumar, A., Oren, D., Espinosa-Jalapa, N. A., Srimani, D., Diskin-Posner, Y., Leitus, G., Shimon, L., Carmieli, R., Ben-David, Y. & Milstein, D., 27 Jan 2020, In : Organometallics. 39, 2, p. 279-285Research output: Contribution to journal ? Article
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Selective room-temperature hydrogenation of amides to amines and alcohols catalyzed by a ruthenium pincer complex and mechanistic insight
Kar, S., Rauch, M., Kumar, A., Leitus, G., Ben-David, Y. & Milstein, D., 21 Apr 2020, In : ACS Catalysis. 10, p. 5511-5515 5 p.Research output: Contribution to journal ? Article
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CO2 activation by manganese pincer complexes through different modes of metal-ligand cooperation (Special issue on Breaking bonds over many timescales: in celebration of Robin Perutz?s 70th birthday)
Kumar, A., Daw, P., Jalapa, N. A. E., Leitus, G., Shimon, L., Ben-David, Y. & Milstein, D., 21 Oct 2019, In : Dalton Transactions. 48, p. 14580-14584Research output: Contribution to journal ? Article
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C?C bond formation of benzyl alcohols and alkynes using a catalytic amount of KOtBu: unusual regioselectivity through a radical mechanism
Kumar, A., Janes, T., Chakraborty, S., Daw, P., Carmieli, R., Diskin-Posner, Y. & Milstein, D., 4 Mar 2019, In : Angewandte Chemie International Edition. 58, 11, p. 3373-3377Research output: Contribution to journal ? Article
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Direct synthesis of amides by acceptorless dehydrogenative coupling of benzyl alcohols and ammonia catalyzed by a manganese pincer complex: unexpected crucial role of base
Daw, P., Kumar, A., Jalapa, N. A. E., Ben-David, Y. & Milstein, D., 7 Aug 2019, In : Journal of the American Chemical Society. 141, 31, p. 12202-12206Research output: Contribution to journal ? Article
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Manganese catalysed hydrogenation of carbamates and urea-derivatives
Das, U., Kumar, A., Ben-David, Y., Iron, M. & Milstein, D., 21 Aug 2019, In : Journal of the American Chemical Society. 141, 33, p. 12962-12966Research output: Contribution to journal ? Article
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Formal oxidative addition of a C-H bond by a 16e iridium(I) complex involves metal-ligand cooperativity
Kumar, A., Feller, M., Diskin-Posner, Y. & Milstein, D., 25 May 2018, In : Chemical Communications. 54, 42, p. 5365-5368Research output: Contribution to journal ? Article