Gary Snyder's research is in the field of physical organic chemistry and focuses on making and studying organic biradicaloids. These species are of interest as a basis for new materials with unique combinations of magnetic and optical properties as well as organic electronic devices. More importantly, they provide important tests of the theoretical methods that chemists use to describe bond breaking and to understand the nature of delocalized π-systems.
Biradicaloids are related to biradicals, which are molecules that have two completely unpaired electrons. Biradicaloid are "ordinary looking" molecules that have large amounts of biradical character — they have an electron pair that is bonded, but only very weakly. Because they contain a "partially broken" bond, most biradicaloids are quite reactive and have only short lifetimes under ordinary conditions. But even though most cannot be observed directly, their reactivity (e.g., Diels-Alder -type reactions) can tell us something about their electronic structures. And in some cases, their structures can be modified to make them hang around long enough to be studied directly (by NMR, UV-vis, etc).
Snyder earned his Ph.D. from Caltech, did postdoctoral work at the University of Colorado, and held faculty positions at the University of Chicago, UC San Diego, UMass, and Amherst College before coming to Mount Holyoke in 2012.
Education
- Ph.D., California Institute of Technology