Rate My Professor Sinead Keaveney

Dr. Sinead Keaveney is an Honorary Lecturer in the School of Natural Sciences at Macquarie University. She earned her PhD in physical organic chemistry from UNSW Australia in 2016, under the supervision of Associate Professor Jason Harper, following a Bachelor of Science (Advanced) with First Class Honours in Chemistry from the same university. Her postdoctoral research was conducted at RWTH Aachen University in Germany from 2016 to 2018, working with Professor Franziska Schoenebeck in the Institute of Organic Chemistry. From 2018 to 2021, she held the position of Macquarie University Research Fellow (MQRF) at Macquarie University, transitioning to her current honorary lecturing role. Since May 2021, she has been a Lecturer in Chemistry at the University of Wollongong, with projects involving undergraduate and higher degree research students in catalytic transformations.

Keaveney's research centers on applied organometallic catalysis to develop efficient, practical, and sustainable synthetic methods for applications in pharmaceutical, agrochemical, and materials chemistry industries. She focuses on designing new catalysts for challenging transformations, creating long-lived recyclable systems, and conducting detailed mechanistic studies using kinetic analyses, computational modeling, and X-ray scattering or absorption techniques. As primary chief investigator, she led the project 'Developing sustainable synthetic methodology using nickel and iron catalysis' from December 2020 to November 2021 and 'Examining the properties and structure of Rh and Ir based hybrid catalysts to gain fundamental insight into their effects on catalysis' in early 2019. Her contributions earned the MQRF fellowship and a $60,000 grant from the AMP Foundation's Tomorrow Fund in 2020 for advancing sustainable chemical production. Key publications include 'Recent advances in the denitrogenative annulation reactions of 1,2,3-thiadiazoles' (ChemCatChem, 2024), 'Bimetallic rhodium complexes: precatalyst activation-triggered bimetallic enhancement for the hydrosilylation transformation' (ACS Catalysis, 2023), 'An investigation into the in vitro metabolic stability of aryl sulfonyl fluorides for their application in medicinal chemistry and radiochemistry' (Molecular Pharmaceutics, 2023), 'Regioselectivity for the Rh(I)-catalyzed annulation of 1,2,3-thiadiazoles with alkynes: Experimental and Computational Analysis Reveal the Surprising Role of the Alkyne Substituent' (ChemCatChem, 2023), and 'Palladium-catalysed decarbonylative trifluoromethylation of acid fluorides' (Angewandte Chemie, 2018).