Dr. Anna Company Casadevall came to Berlin this April.
Anna Company is working as a postdoctoral Marie Curie research fellow in the working group supervised by Prof. Dr. Matthias Driess at the Technische Universität Berlin.
Her current work is centred on the preparation of nickel complexes (focusing on robust nitrogen-based ligand scaffolds and carbene N-heterocyclic systems) as catalysts for the oxidation of hydrocarbons using environmentally friendly oxidants like molecular oxygen and hydrogen peroxide. This project is also directed towards the detection and characterisation of novel Ni-O2 species.
Anna Company Casadevall was born in Banyoles (Spain) in 1982. She graduated in Chemistry from the University of Girona in 2004. In 2005, she started her PhD studies in the Department of Chemistry at the same University in the "Bioinorganic and Supramolecular Chemistry Group" under the supervision of Dr. Miquel Costas. During her PhD work she had the opportunity to spend two short research periods abroad, one at the University of Minnesota (Minneapolis) under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Lawrence Que Jr. and one at the Max Planck Institute for Bioinorganic Chemistry (Mülheim an der Ruhr, Germany) with Prof. Dr. Karl Wieghardt.
Her PhD work was mainly focused on the development of model systems of O2-activating proteins containing copper and iron. Specifically, she developed binuclear copper complexes as models of tyrosinase and she synthesised novel non-heme iron complexes as catalysts for the oxidation of alkanes and olefins. She obtained her PhD in December 2008.
Company's three most important papers
"Alkane Hydroxylation by a Nonheme Iron Catalyst that Challenges the Heme Paradigm for Oxygenase Action". Company, A.; Gomez, L.; Goell, M.; Ribas, X.; Luis, J. M.; Que Jr, L.; Costas, M. J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2007, 129, 15766 - 15767.
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ja077761n
"Tyrosinase-Like Reactivity in a CuIII2(u-O)2 Species".Company, A.; Palavicini, S.; Garcia-Bosch, I.; Mas-Balleste, R.; Que Jr, L.; Rybak-Akimova, E. V.; Casella, L.; Ribas, X.; Costas, M. Chem. Eur. J. 2008, 14, 3535 - 3538.
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/117935111/abstract
"Olefin-Dependent Discrimination Between Two Nonheme HO-FeV=O Tautomeric Species in Catalytic H2O2 Epoxidations". Company, A.; Feng, Y.; Goell, M.; Ribas, X.; Luis, J. M.; Que Jr, L.; Costas, M. Chem. Eur. J. 2009, 15, 3359 - 3362.
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/122210081/abstract