Catalysis offers the prospect of low energy, low waste synthetic routes to chemical products, i.e. clean chemical technology. Homogeneous catalysis is one of the most elegant and useful applications of transition metal chemistry and it is therefore not surprising that it is intensively studied throughout the world.

It is difficult to overstate the importance of phosphorus(III) ligands for academic and industrial research in homogeneous catalysis. Pick up any current chemistry journal concerned with synthesis and you will find many papers featuring applications of M-P(III) catalysts to processes ranging from megatonne commodity chemicals to milligramme quantities of natural products.

The research we do concerns the design and synthesis of new phosphorus(III) ligands for transition metal complexation and homogeneous catalysis.

Professor Pringle is a supervisor in the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Chemical Synthesis