Amanda K. Turek

Areas of Expertise

Organic chemists use arrow-pushing mechanisms to describe how starting materials transform into products.  But how do we know what the “right” mechanism is?  For almost every organic chemical reaction, we could propose multiple different arrow-pushing mechanisms, but we need to experimentally distinguish between them.  We need to figure out whether bonds form first or break first—or maybe both happen at the same time.  We also need to determine what is important in the rate-limiting step, and which factors don’t influence rate.  How can we answer these questions when we can’t directly observe a chemical reaction in progress?  In the Turek Lab, we use the physical organic chemist’s toolkit—kinetic analysis, structure/function relationships, and computational chemistry—to elucidate reaction mechanisms and determine which pathway an organic transformation is likely to follow.  This is of fundamental interest to organic chemists, but also has practical implications.  Understanding the mechanism of a reaction provides a basis on which we can design catalysts, improve a reaction, or even discover new modes of reactivity.  Building on our mechanistic work in the Turek Group, we aim to make advances in these areas too.