RESEARCH AREAS

Gary W. Brudvig

Gary W. Brudvig Professor Yale University E: g-brudvig@northwestern.edu Brudvig Group B.S., University of Minnesota, 1976; Ph.D., Caltech 1980

Biographical Sketch

While at Caltech, Gary W. Brudvig (Ph.D., 1980) investigated the metal centers in cytochrome c oxidase under the direction of Sunney I. Chan. After two years as a Miller Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California-Berkeley studying photosynthetic water oxidation with Kenneth Sauer, he joined the Chemistry faculty at Yale University in 1982, where he is now the Eugene Higgins Professor and Chair of Chemistry and Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry. His lectureships include the Watkins Lectureship (Wichita State University), the Chan Lectureship (Academia Sinica) and the Baker Lectureship (Cornell University). He has served as a Member of the National Institutes of Health Physical Biochemistry study section, as Chair of the Gordon Research Conference on the Biophysical Aspects of Photosynthesis and is currently an Associate Editor for the American Chemical Society journal Biochemistry. He has published over 200 papers. Brudvig is currently the principal investigator of a U.S. Department of Energy-supported program of research aimed at using oxomanganese catalysts for solar fuel production.

Research Statement

Research in the Brudvig group focuses on the water oxidation chemistry of photosystem II and manganese model chemistry.  The aim of this work is to define how nature has solved the difficult problem of the efficient light-driven, four-electron oxidation of water to molecular oxygen in photosynthesis and to use the insight gained from study of the natural system to develop artificial systems that split water using sunlight. Towards this end, a variety of biochemical, biophysical and spectroscopic methods are used, including EPR (electron paramagnetic resonance) spectroscopy, optical spectroscopy and electrochemistry. This research involves close collaborations with a several other groups, especially with the group of Victor Batista (Yale) who applies state-of-art computational methods to analyze the structure and function of the oxygen-evolving complex in photosystem II.

Publications

• “A Functional Model for O-O Bond Formation by the O2-evolving Complex in Photosystem II,” J. Limburg, J.S. Vrettos, L. M. Liable-Sands, A. L. Rheingold, R. H. Crabtree, and G. W. Brudvig, Science 283, 1524-7 (1999).
• “Molecular Recognition in Regioselective Oxygenation of Saturated C-H bonds by a Dimanganese Catalyst,” S. Das, C. D. Incarvito, R. H. Crabtree, and G. W. Brudvig, Science 312, 1941-1943 (2006).
• “Ultrafast Photooxidation of Mn(II)-Terpyridine Complexes Covalently Attached to TiO2 Nanoparticles,” S. G. Abuabara, C. W. Cady, J. B. Baxter, C. A. Schmuttenmaer, R. H. Crabtree, G. W. Brudvig, and V. S. Batista, J. Phys. Chem. C 111, 11982-11990 (2007).

Most Significant Honors & Awards

• Fellowship, Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation Newly Appointed Faculty, 1982
• Scholar, Searle Scholars Program, 1983-86
• Teacher-Scholar, Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation, 1985-90
• Research Fellow, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, 1986-88
• Elected Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1995