R. David Crouch Associate Professor Department of Chemistry Dickinson College

Teaching Interests: My primary teaching responsibilities at Dickinson include Foundations of Chemistry and Chem 241/242 (Organic Chemistry). From time to time, I also teach Chem 111 (Topics in Chemistry) and Chem 490 (Special Topics: Medicinal Chemistry).

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, 27 Dickinson students have been co-authors on publications from my lab.

Currently, we are working on the use of microwave irradiation as a means of accelerating some organic reactions.

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. 

Some other work of note has been the preparation of four 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.   Most recently, I published a review on the preparation of 2-substituted imidazolines in Tetrahedron.

For a complete list, see my publication list.

Contact me at crouch@dickinson.edu