William B. Tolman

William B. Tolman (born May 20, 1961, in Cleveland, Ohio) an American inorganic chemist focusing on the synthesis and characterization of model bioinorganic systems, and organometallic approaches towards polymer chemistry. He is currently the Al and Mary Agnes McQuinn Distinguished Chair and Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of St. Thomas (Minnesota). He has served as Editor in Chief of the ACS journal Inorganic Chemistry, and as a Senior Investigator at the NSF Center for Sustainable Polymers. Tolman is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Chemical Society.

Early life and education

Tolman was born on May 20, 1961, in Cleveland, but grew up in Chelmsford, Massachusetts. With Cutler, Tolman studied the bimetallic activation of coordinated ligands of molybdenum cyclopentadienyl complexes.

Tolman then moved on to graduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where he worked in the laboratory of Prof. K. Peter C. Vollhardt as a W. R. Grace Graduate Fellow. In Vollhardt's laboratory, Tolman studied photochemistry and ligand substitution reactions of bimetallic coordination complexes with the fulvalene ligand. Tolman graduated with a Ph.D. in chemistry in 1987. He then synthesized complexes that model nonheme diiron proteins, and studied their reactivity with O2.

Career Tolman began his independent career in 1990, as an assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities (UMN). He previously served as the Chair of the Department of Chemistry at UMN, from 2009 to 2016. In 2018, Tolman moved with his research group to Washington University in St. Louis. Generally, Tolman's research group works on the synthesis of bioinorganic coordination complexes that model the active sites of metalloproteins, as well as the synthesis of organometallic complexes for the polymerization of cyclic esters.

Copper-oxygen adducts Tolman's work in the bioinorganic field focuses on Cu-O adducts, specifically copper proteins whose diverse, biological functions include: O2 transport, aromatic ring oxidations, biogenesis of hormones. His work studies the potential of 1:1 Cu/O2 adducts as catalytic species, which have been known as transient intermediates for more commonly studied 2:1 and even 3:1 Cu/O2 molecules. These complexes, while kinetically favored in formation are thermodynamically unstable due to negative entropy values, thus making them more difficult to isolate.

Organometallic polymerization catalysts

He was elected a Fellow of the American Chemical Society in 2010, and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2006.