Nilay Hazari
Nilay was born in Suva, Fiji and spent the first 17 years of his life in Melbourne, Australia. After that he moved to Sydney where he received a B.Sc (2002) and an M.Sc (2003) from the University of Sydney working with Professor Leslie D Field. He completed a D.Phil (2006) as a Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford under the supervision of Professor Jennifer C Green and then worked for three years as a postdoctoral scholar with Professors John E Bercaw and Jay A Labinger at the California Institute of Technology. Nilay began as an Assistant Professor of Chemistry at Yale University in July 2009 and is currently a Professor of Chemistry.
Research in the Hazari group involves synthetic inorganic and organometallic chemistry, with an emphasis on reaction mechanisms and catalysis. The long term goal of most projects is to develop homogeneous transition metal catalysts for chemical transformations, which could result in the development of more energy efficient and affordable industrial processes. Furthermore, we believe that it is important to understand reaction mechanisms, as this can play a crucial role in improving catalysts. A variety of techniques including multinuclear NMR spectroscopy, IR and UV-Visible spectroscopy, mass spectrometry, X-ray crystallography, isotopic labelling studies and computational chemistry are used to characterize compounds and investigate reaction mechanisms.
