profile 3: dr. joseph sadighi

YAY! One of the readers of this website (hiya Val!) suggested I look at Dr. Joseph Sadighi at the prestigious Massacusetts Institute of Technology. Upon looking at the website, I remembered him from my own visit and grad school application to MIT and for sure, this one's a dreamboat as well.

Dr. Sadighi is an assistant professor of chemistry at MIT working on inorganic and organometallic chemistry focusing on catalysis (YAY! he's NOT a natural products chemist!). He's actually one of my group's competitors so I feel that perhaps it's a confilct of interest writing about him but he's really goodlooking anyway. He works on dioxygen activation using transition metal complexes (coordination chemistry, etc..lots of inorganic chemists in the US do this kind of thing..i know) and tries to use these complexes to activate organic substrates. His chemistry is pretty green actually (environmental green..not money/financial success green) and so that's really nice considering the push for more environmentally friendly catalysis that his group tries to do.

His research statement is listed below cause it's only fair that I do it as well.
"Research in my group will focus on inorganic and organometallic chemistry, principally geared toward catalysis. I am particularly interested in the development of catalytic processes based on the activation of small molecules, such as carbon dioxide, dioxygen, and dinitrogen, and in the catalytic formation of carbon-fluorine bonds.

The development of powerful and general catalysts for aerobic oxidation is an ongoing challenge in inorganic chemistry, with potentially enormous importance from both synthetic and environmental perspectives. We are studying the activation of dioxygen by late transition metal complexes, and the oxidation of organic substrates by the resulting complexes. We are also examining the independent synthesis of highly reactive oxo and imido complexes, electronically and structurally related to the oxygen-activation products. A common theme is the use of heavily fluorinated ligands, both to increase the oxidizing power of the intermediates, and to protect the complexes from self-oxidation.

The use of carbon dioxide as a carbon source, with the eventual purpose of recycling some of the carbon lost to the atmosphere through combustion, represents a major goal in transition metal catalysis. A number of metal-carbon bonds have been shown to insert carbon dioxide, but in most cases the resulting carboxylates are rather inert. As a result, catalytic carbon-carbon bond-forming processes involving this reaction are relatively rare. We are interested in the reductive carboxylation of unsaturated substrates, and in the electrophilic activation of hydrocarbons for carboxylation, using organometallic catalysis.

Fluorocarbons are of growing importance as replacements for chlorinated hydrocarbons, and a large number of pharmacologically important molecules contain carbon-fluorine bonds. Electrophilic fluorination, an important process, often requires the use of hazardous molecular fluorine, or of costly surrogates. Very few examples of metal-catalyzed carbon-fluorine bond formation are known, but the development of general catalytic processes, using common fluoride sources, would be an important synthetic advance. We will investigate the addition of fluoride to metal-coordinated unsaturated molecules. The ultimate goal of this project is the development of electrophilic fluorination processes using a metal catalyst, a relatively innocuous HF source, and a benign oxidant such as dioxygen." - Joseph Sadighi

Now here's what I'm sure most of my readers are interested in. Research is nice an all but let's get to the hotness shall we?


This is his profile picture on the MIT Website. All I have to say is he has really dreamy eyes. My ex had eyes like this which I absolutely loved and I cant believe I forgot about this man in looking fo profile writing! Also the smirk is cocky in a way, but of course he has every right to be cocky! He's a professor at MIT! Now let's hope that gets tenure cause seeing him sad would be a sad, sad sight.

His other images on his website are kind of blurry so I cant exactly provide a detailed hotness analysis on that, but you can go look for yourself and decide. From what I remember about my visit to MIT, he is a very nice man and eager to please (he was trying to recruit us graduate students afterall). All I remember is just looking at him, drooling slightly, but not as much as I did when I was at TSRI for my visit. Dangit..looking back on these profiles makes me wonder why I chose another school.wait..$$$ was why..haha!

So now for the final score!

Joseph Sadighi is...a piquin!


If you're interested in learning about my hotness rating, I'd check out a Scoville rating to see that. I dont feel like reposting the Scoville ratings, but piquin is pretty high up there! Thanks Val for the suggestion!