Former Houk group undergraduate researcher Professor Osvaldo Gutierrez, University of Maryland, named one of Chemical and Engineering News’ Talented 12.
The Talented Twelve list, created by the American Chemical Society’s (ACS) weekly magazine Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN), highlights young investigators who are “enterprising chemists (who) are solving some of science’s toughest problems.”
As a UCLA chemistry undergraduate, Gutierrez conducted research in Professor Ken Houk’s group. He earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in chemistry from UCLA in 2009 and was awarded the department’s Dolores Cannon Southam Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Research award.
After graduating, Gutierrez joined the group of UCLA alumnus and former Houk group member, Professor Dean Tantillo (Ph.D. ’00), at UC Davis where he received his Ph.D. in chemistry in 2012. He was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania until he joined the Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry at the University of Maryland as Assistant Professor in 2016.
“Osvaldo is a wonderful person who learns and dreams up great things effortlessly,” Houk said. “He went through hell as an undocumented student but thrived nevertheless, and everyone he has met is first impressed by what a down-to-earth friendly fellow he is, and then by the awesome work he does. His specialty is in developing practical and amazing CC bond forming reactions with earth-abundant metal catalysts and using theory to guide him in productive directions. His background is unusual and the limits of his future are boundless.”
Pictured above: Gutierrez joined fellow UCLA alums Profs. Steven Lopez (Ph.D. ’15 with Houk, now Assistant Professor at Northeastern University) and Luis Campos (Ph.D. ’06 with Garcia-Garibay and Houk, now Professor at Columbia) at the department’s research showcase at the 2019 ACS meeting in San Diego.
Photo courtesy of Steven A. Lopez
From Chemical & Engineering News (by Sam Lemonick):
Credit: Osvaldo Gutierrez/University of Maryland (Gutierrez); Jynto/Wikimedia Commons (structure); Shutterstock (numbers, element, pills)
C&EN’s Talented Twelve – Osvaldo Gutierrez
Organic polymath is coaxing tricky metals into helping forge carbon-carbon bonds
Chemists often reach for transition-metal catalysts when they need to add hard-to-make bonds, like carbon-carbon bonds, to a molecule. But the best of these catalysts use expensive metals such as palladium, and that drives up the price of the molecules made in these reactions.
Osvaldo Gutierrez thinks he can find ways to use cheap, abundant iron to make those same bonds and bring down the cost of lifesaving drug molecules. A professor at the University of Maryland, Gutierrez experienced firsthand the difference cancer drugs made in the last years of his mother’s life. “I saw her pain before taking those medicines,” he says. “I can only imagine how many people around the world are going through that because they don’t have access to those medicines.”
Gutierrez brings a rare set of skills to bear for understanding these catalytic reactions. “He is unique in being an outstanding computational and experimental chemist at the same time,” says University of California, Los Angeles, chemist Kendall Houk, who mentored Gutierrez when he was an undergraduate.
That’s good, because iron is not an easy metal to model. Multiple oxidation states, radicals, and complex electron interactions make iron complexes difficult to simulate accurately. University of Pennsylvania chemist Gary Molander, who has collaborated with Gutierrez on reactions catalyzed by another tricky metal, nickel, says even the highest-profile computational chemists “don’t want to touch the stuff Osvaldo does.”
Not only can Gutierrez and his group chart the fine details of these catalytic mechanisms, they can use that knowledge to develop new reactions, like making new carbon-carbon bonds on unactivated alkenes. His secret is to be fearless. “I tell my students we’re going to be tackling things that are very challenging, but we’re going to provide unique information to the world,” he says.
Getting to where he is now—a tenure-track professor at a large, research-focused university with papers in top journals—is a feat for any scientist. Still, Gutierrez’s path has been longer and steeper than most.
He came to the US from Mexico as an undocumented immigrant when he was 9. Gutierrez ran a construction business and nearly became a professional boxer, all before he graduated high school.
Without legal status, Gutierrez found many closed doors. His childhood dream of becoming a doctor disintegrated when no medical school would admit him. He discovered a love for synthetic chemistry under Houk, but avoided lab work for fear an accident could endanger him or his department legally. He didn’t learn the skills of experimental chemistry until his postdoctoral studies at the University of Pennsylvania, after gaining legal status in 2012 through the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
Since his time at Penn, Gutierrez has been working with the Alliance for Diversity in Science and Engineering to create opportunities and build community for underrepresented people in chemistry. It’s one way that he can now play a role he sees as having been vital to his success: that of a mentor. “I could easily have fallen into the cracks,” he says, if not for his mentors along the way.
And as for his plan to be a doctor? Gutierrez isn’t upset anymore: “If I knew what a research professor was, I would have chosen it all my life.”
VITALS
Current affiliation: University of Maryland
Age: 36
PhD alma mater: University of California, Davis
Hometown: Salamanca, Mexico
If I weren’t a chemist, I’d be: A boxer. “When I was young I dreamed of becoming the next Julio César Chávez!”
If I were an element, I’d be: Iron. “It’s everywhere, has a lot of untapped potential in chemical synthesis, and often scares computational chemists!”
Research at a Glance:
Gutierrez used computational modeling to explain how a radical mechanism with inexpensive nickel catalysts can enable reactions that form carbon-carbon bonds. Credit: Adapted from J. Am. Chem. Soc./Yang H. Ku/C&EN
