About the seminar:

The design of paramagnetic coordination complexes with temperature-dependent chemical shifts is a major goal in biomedicine as it would allow temperature to be measured in vivo by MRI. While such behavior is well-established in lanthanide complexes on account of their magnetic anisotropy, transition metal thermometry is still in its nascent stages. Our laboratory reports two Fe(II) complexes that exhibit both exceptional temperature dependence and long-lived nuclear spin coherence. Naturally, we wish to identify what magnetostructural effects cause these d-block complexes to behave in a classically f-block manner. To that end, we deploy a diverse array of experimental techniques to elucidate the speciation, conformation, electronic structure, and magnetic properties of our complexes in solution. Then, with the help of DFT, we show how each of these properties fuse together to afford the observed chemical shifts. The end goal of this project is to identify a design principle by which the thermometry capabilities observed in these Fe(II) complexes can be engineered into other transition metal complexes and perhaps even enhanced.