Eric Nacsa is awarded Doctoral New Investigator PRF Grant
Eric Nacsa, assistant professor of chemistry, has been awarded a Doctoral New Investigator PRF Grant to support his work on the direct electrochemical activation of N-Heteroarenes for C-C and C-N bond formation. This grant is open to principal investigators in the first three years of an academic appointment at Ph.D.-granting institutions.
One unique aspect of this grant is that at least 60% of the funds must be used to support student salaries and benefits over a two-year period. The proposal was based almost entirely on preliminary results obtained by Edward Hilvano, a “talented and thoughtful” third-year graduate student at Penn State working with Nacsa, who will therefore be supported by this grant.
American Chemical Society Petroleum Research Fund (ACS PRF) grants support fundamental research in the petroleum field. The Nacsa Group was funded under the area termed synthetic organic chemistry. According to Nacsa, this field involves the conversion of “petroleum feedstocks – carbon-based compounds that are simple and widely available but have little inherent value – into more complex and valuable products. This mission aligns almost exactly with the overarching motivation for my research group at Penn State – as well as many others around the globe – and a key aspect of my group’s work is that we pass electricity through chemical compounds to convert them sustainably into value-added products.”
Nacsa uses a “Lego building-block" analogy to describe how complex organic molecules are composed of simpler building blocks and the challenges for making ones containing N-Heteroarenes. These compounds represent a wide array of medicines and materials, but unlike Lego bricks, they cannot be straightforwardly assembled from their constituent building blocks. Nacsa states his group’s strategy therefore “uses electric current to coax those typically unreactive building blocks to achieve the elusive ‘snapping’ straight onto other chemical fragments, allowing chemists to generate a range of useful chemicals more efficiently.”
This ACS PRF grant is the first external award Nacsa has received in his independent career. Prior to joining the Penn State faculty in the summer of 2019, he received a Ph.D. in Chemistry from Columbia University in 2015 and then completed his training at Princeton University in 2019 as a NIH Postdoctoral Fellow.