Suzanne Blum


Suzanne A. Blum is an American professor of organometallic chemistry at the University of California, Irvine.

Education

Blum studied chemistry as an undergraduate at the University of Michigan. As evidenced by the 2000 Departmental newsletter, she had already participated in multiple teaching and research projects, winning outstanding American Chemical Society student chapter, the UM Alumni Leadership award, and a National Science Foundation fellowship to attend graduate school at UC-Berkeley. Blum published multiple first-author papers and received teaching awards throughout her tenure at UC-Berkeley. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard Medical School in 2006.

Research

Prof. Blum's research focuses on the development of new reactions based on "early" transition metals and on monitoring reaction intermediates by a combination of fluorescent and analytical methods. While many of her initial independent research publications were based on fleeting complexes of gold or platinum, she has more recently focused on copper-catalyzed borylation reactions to make advanced oxygen-containing heterocycles, amenable to pharmaceutical and agricultural derivation. Blum's group advocates for use of single-molecule techniques often borrowed from biological or physical contexts, and using them to observe intermediates in "classical" reactions.

Awards