R. David Crouch Associate Professor and Chair Department of Chemistry Dickinson College

Teaching Interests: My primary teaching responsibilities at Dickinson include Chem 141 (Foundations of Chemistry) and Chem 241 - 242 (Synthesis and Reactivity). From time to time, I teach Chem 352 (Integrated Lab), Chem 355 (Bioorganic Chemistry) and Chem 490 (Special Topics).

Links to Class Pages:     Chem 111   Chem 141        Chem 241        Chem 241 Lab     Chem 242    Chem 242 Lab   

Research Interests: Recently, my students and I have been working on methods to selectively deprotect silyl-protected alcohols and phenols. To understand this imagine that you have a complex molecule that you want to change. The molecule contains many functional groups including at least 2 alcohol groups. One of the changes that you would like to make involves performing a reaction at one of the other functional groups... but the alcohols will interfere with that reaction. So, you attach silyl protecting groups to the alcohols, rendering them temporarily inactive and allowing you to perform your desired transformation. Now, suppose you next wanted to do a reaction on one of the alcohols but not on the other. You would then need to remove one silyl protecting group but not the other. We have been working on developing techniques to perform such a selective removal of one silyl group in the presence of another. Students are active participants in my research lab and, to date, 37 Dickinson students have been co-authors on publications from my lab.

I am also interested in developing new microscale experiments for the laboratory portion of Synthesis & Reactivity (or, organic chemistry).  My students also help in this work and, to date, students have been co-authors on several publications describing these experiments in the Journal of Chemical Education  and the Chemical Educator.  My interest in the development of microscale labs for the undergraduate chemistry curriculum has led to my recent appointment as the editor of the Microscale Laboratory feature in the Journal of Chemical Education.

Some other work of note has been the preparation of three reviews of the chemical literature. The first was a review of work on selectively deprotecting silyl-protected alcohols and was published in the journal Synthesis in 1996. The second review is a chapter for Organic Reactions on Ullmann and related biaryl couplings published in 2004. Both of these projects have been done as collaborations with Dr Todd D. Nelson of Merck Research Laboratories. And, finally a follow up review on selective desilylations was published in 2004.

For a complete list, see my publication list.

Contact me at crouch@dickinson.edu