Marcetta Y. Darensbourg

Marcetta York Darensbourg is an inorganic/organometallic chemist whose earlier synthetic expertise and mechanistic studies of low valent transition metal hydrides have evolved into current efforts towards the development of synthetic analogues of enzyme active sites that contain metal-carbon bonds–especially the carbon monoxide- and cyanide-stabilized iron centers in hydrogenases that are known from spectroscopies and protein crystallography. Biomimetics are designed to reproduce key structural, spectroscopic and reactivity features of the natural organometallic catalysts that connect to the catalytic electrochemical mechanisms of these natural fuel cell catalysts, as well as carbon-carbon coupling processes as in acetyl-coA synthase. Marcetta is a native of Kentucky, with an undergraduate degree in chemistry from Union College, Barbourville KY, and a Ph.D. in Inorganic Chemistry from the University of Illinois. Following academic posts at Vassar College and Tulane University, she joined the faculty at Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, in 1982. She holds the title of Distinguished Professor of Chemistry at TAMU and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences; she is a fellow of the American Chemical Society and the Royal Society of Chemistry.