Dr. Reto Dorta

Biography

Reto Dorta studied chemistry at the University of Neuchatel and the University of Salerno. He joined Professor Georg Süss-Fink's group at the University of Neuchatel for his Diploma work in 1997 and subsequently moved to the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, where he earned his doctoral degree under Professor David Milstein in 2002. After a one-year postdoctoral stay at the University of New Orleans with Professor Steven P. Nolan, he joined Professor John E. Bercaw at the California Institute of Technology for a second postdoc. In 2005, he moved to the Organic Chemistry Institute at the University of Zürich. In December 2011, he took his current position as Associate Professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of Western Australia and was promoted to Professor in 2014. His research is directed towards the preparation of reactive transition metal complexes for stoichiometric catalytic applications, focusing on the development of new chiral and non-chiral auxiliary ligand systems that can bind, activate, and functionalize substrates at the metal center. He is currently involved in catalytic trials involving new ligands, aiming to identify new ligand families corresponding to metal complexes for new, selective, and widely applicable catalytic transformations. He is open to supervising highly motivated students and encourages direct applications.

Research Interests

Experience