Alexander Umanzor

Alex is a Salvadoran American organometallic chemist. He earned his B.S. in chemistry at UCLA, where he conducted undergraduate research in the groups of Prof. Alex Spokoyny and Ken Houk. He is a Ph.D. candidate and NSF graduate research fellow at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, where he works with Prof. Courtney Roberts on late transition metal aryne chemistry. He uses a combined experimental and computational approach towards 1) enabling the regioselective difunctionalization of nickel aryne complexes via ligand control, and 2) elucidating the electronic structure of these complexes to answer questions regarding bonding, selectivity, and reactivity.