Meera Mehta

Prior to being recruited to Oxford as an Associate Professor in Inorganic Chemistry and Trinity College as a Tutorial Fellow, I was a Lecturer at the University of Manchester. I completed my PhD at the University of Toronto (2012-2017), before securing a RS Newton Fellowship which I held at the University of Oxford (2018-2019). What inspires me about working in the sciences is the unflinching effort to better understand the world around us.

As a Tutorial Fellow in Inorganic Chemistry at Trinity, I deliver tutorials to all Trinity undergraduates studying for their Chemistry MChem degree. I also offer lectures for the Department of Chemistry, and run an active research group where I supervise Part II undergraduate (4^th year research students) and DPhil students.

I am interested in understanding the fundamental chemistry of earth abundant and inexpensive elements to provide synthetic science with more sustainable catalysts and materials. My research group studies both discrete molecular compounds and complex clusters.

Current research efforts in the group are largely focused on applying these sustainable catalysts for the synthesis of important feedstock chemicals used by the manufacturing sector, and for the removal and recycling of environmental toxins (e.g., greenhouse gases). These research efforts feed into the UN sustainable development goals: affordable and clean energy; responsible consumption and production; and climate action. As well as the European Green Deal and global clean growth efforts. To achieve these goals, the Mehta group uses methods in inert-atmosphere synthesis, organic catalysis, conducting reactions at the gas-solution interface, NMR spectroscopy, single crystal X-ray diffraction, EPR spectroscopy and computational chemistry, amongst others.

We engage with collaborators around the world and take a bottom-up approach to ensure we both understand our catalysts while increasing their performance and opening new reaction pathways.

A Zintl Cluster for Transition Metal-Free Catalysis: C=O Bond Reductions

B. van IJzendoorn, S. F. Albawardi, I. J. Vitorica-Yrezabal, G. F. S. Whitehead, J. E. McGrady*, M. Mehta*, J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2022 , 144, 21213–21223.

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/jacs.2c08559

Nitrenium Salts in Lewis Acid Catalysis

M. Mehta*, J. M. Goicoechea*, Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2020, 59, 2715–2719. (Hot Paper)

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/anie.201915547

Heteroallene Capture and Exchange at Functionalised Heptaphosphane Clusters

B. van IJzendoorn, I. J. Vitorica-Yrezabal, G. F. S. Whitehead. M. Mehta*, Chem. Eur. J. 2022, 28, e202103737.

https://chemistry-europe.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/chem.202103737