Professor Thomas Braun studied chemistry at the Julius-Maximilians-Universit?t Würzburg and received his Ph.D. under the supervision of Helmut Werner. After a short stay with Pierre Dixneuf (Rennes, France) and postdoctoral work with Robin Perutz (York, UK), he obtained his habilitation at the University of Bielefeld (mentor: Peter Jutzi). In 2007, he was appointed Professor of Inorganic Chemistry at the Humboldt-Universit?t zu Berlin, where he is full professor since 2011. Thomas Braun received the W?hler Award for Young Scientists in 2006, the RSC Fluorine Chemistry Prize in 2007, and the Fluorine Publication prize of the Fluorine Subject Group of the German Chemical Society in 2015. From 2010 to 2012 he served as the chair of the GDCh Fluorine Chemistry division and was from 2009 to 2018 vice-chair of the DFG (German Research Foundation) Research Training Group GRK 1582 "Fluorine as the Key Element". Currently he is vice-speaker of the DFG Collaborative Research Center "Fluorospecific Interactions: Fundamentals and Applications", and is also Executive Committee Member of the Fluorine Division of the ACS. The major interests of Thomas Braun are in organometallic and fluorine chemistry as well as coordination chemistry with an emphasis on the catalytic activation of small molecules. This involves C?F and C?H bond activation reactions, but as well the chemistry of sulfur fluorides. He also has an interest in heterogeneous catalysis.
Fluorinated materials and compounds are of an enormous importance in material science as well as for pharmaceuticals and agrochemicals. The strategies involve catalytic C-H and C-F activation reactions, fluorination reactions as well as the development of new fluorinating agents. The replacement of a fluorine atom in a highly fluorinated molecule (i.e. a C-F activation) is a unique strategy to access new fluorinated building blocks. In this talk, transition-metal mediated fluorination and defluorination processes will be introduced. Typical examples involve conversions of fluorinated aromatics, heteroaromatics and olefins. Based on mechanistic studies and stoichiometric reactions, usually catalytic processes are developed to access new fluorinated compounds and materials. Several examples for C-F activation reactions and catalytic transformations will be introduced detailedly.
