The Szymczak group studies synthetic inorganic and organometallic chemistry aimed at developing new catalytic methods for energy delivery, storage and recycling. Our research focuses on establishing new ways by which molecular catalysts can be tuned and tailored by the incorporation of pendent functional groups within a metal’s secondary coordination sphere environment. We seek to exploit these interactions in order to make and break chemical bonds at will, as a means for energy storage, and also to uncover new chemical transformations of energy-relevant small molecules. Of current interest is the design of catalysts that turn on or off with an applied bias, such as pH or another straightforward late-stage catalyst modification. Selected reactions include hydrogenation/dehydrogenation of biorelevant alcohols and amines, as well as related hydrofunctionalization reactions using earth-abundant metals. Another focus of the group’s research is repurposing industrial waste gases into new useful compounds. One of the recent examples of this strategy is the activation and transfer of fluoroform, which is an industrial waste gas from the Teflon industry.