Miguel Garcia-Garibay

Biography

Miguel A. Garcia-Garibay received his B.S. degree from the University of Michoacan in Mexico and his Ph.D. from the University of British Columbia, working with Prof. J. R. Scheffer. He joined the group Prof. Nick Turro as a postdoctodal fellow at Columbia University before moving to the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at UCLA where he rose through the faculty ranks. He is now a Distinguished Professor and serves as Dean of Physical Sciences and Senior of the UCLA College of Letters and Sciences.  Miguel achieved international reputation for work in reactive intermediates, solid-state organic chemistry, photochemistry, and crystalline molecular machines. He was elected Fellow of the American Chemical Society In 2019, elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2020, a corresponding member of the Mexican Academy of Sciences in 2021, and to the National Academy of Sciences in 2023.

Research

Our group aims at advancing the field of organic solid-state chemistry by taking advantage of the reduced entropy and emergent properties that characterize the crystalline solid state.  Our research covers fundamental and applied aspects of photochemical reactivity, chemical dynamics, green chemistry, and the development of functional materials and artificial molecular machines.  Early on we demonstrated that photochemically reactive crystals can be “engineered” by selecting compounds with chromophores known to generate highly reactive intermediates  and we showed that crystals control the fate of otherwise chaotic species, such as carbenes, biradicals and radical pairs.  We combined structural information from single crystal X-ray diffraction and computational methods with reactivity and spectroscopic information to gain a deeper understanding of reaction mechanisms.  Our studies on absolute kinetic in crystals include strongly entangled radical pairs as potential qubit pairs in quantum information science and crystals designed for signal amplification through quantum chain reactions.  Our group has helped developed of the emergent field of “amphidynamic crystals” as a platform for artificial molecular machines based on molecules structurally encoded to guide crystallization, while also containing degrees of freedom for mechanical functions in the crystalline state.  Some of our recent work includes examples of multi-scale phenomena, where molecular and macroscopic scale motion.

Selected Publications

Su, Y.-S. ; Lamb,  E.;  Liepuoniute, I.;  Chronister, A.; Guzman, P.; Stanton, A.; Perez, S.; Chang, T.;  Houk, K. N.; Garcia-Garibay, M.; Brown, S. E. “Dipolar order in an amphidynamic crystalline metal–organic framework through reorienting linkers” Nature Chem. 2021, 13, 278–283. DOI: 10.1038/s41557-020-00618-6

Dotson, J. J.; Liepuoniute, I.; Bachman, L. J.; Hipwell, V. M.; Khan, S. I.; Houk, K. N.; Garg, N. K. Garcia-Garibay, M. A. “Taming Radical Pairs in the Crystalline Solid State: Discovery and Total Synthesis of Psychotriadine.” J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2021, 143, 4043–4054. DOI: 10.1021/jacs.1c01100 

Liu, Z.; Wang, Y.; Khan, S.; Garcia-Garibay, M.A. “Rotational Dynamics of an Amphidynamic Zirconium Metal-Organic Framework Determined by Dielectric Spectroscopy” J. Phys. Chem. C. 2021, 12, 5644–5648. DOI: 10.1021/acs.jpclett.1c01333

Hipwell, V. M.; Zee, C.-T.; Rodriguez. J.;  Garcia-Garibay, M. A. Scale-Dependent Photosalience and Topotactic Reaction of Microcrystalline Benzylidenebutyrolactone Determined by Electron Microscopy and Electron Diffraction. Crystal Growth & Design, 2022, 22, 1533–1537. DOI: 10.1021/acs.cgd.1c01378

Hipwell, V.M.; Meyer, A. R.; Garcia-Garibay, M.A. Exceptionally Long Lifetimes of Strongly Entangled Acyl–Trityl Radical Pairs Photochemically Generated in Crystalline Trityl Ketones, J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2023, 145, 1342–1348.  DOI: 10.1021/jacs.2c11787

Rivera, E.;  Paul, I.;  Fajardo Jr, J.; Garcia-Garibay. M. A. Quantum Chain Amplification in Nanocrystalline Dewar Benzenes by Intramolecular Sensitization. Chem. Science, 2023, 14, 5802-5810. DOI: 10.1039/D3SC01074K

Liepuoniute, I.; Houk K. N.; Garcia-Garibay, M. A. “Computational Study of Ground State Destabilization Effects and Dipole-dipole Interaction Energies in Amphidynamic Crystals”, J. Org. Chem. 2023, manuscript under revision.

King, J.; Garcia-Garibay, M. A. Absolute Kinetics of the Triplet Excited State of Nanocrystalline 4,4’-Dimethylbenzophenone: Contributions from Intermolecular H-Atom Transfer and Reductive Quenching. J. Phys. Chem. 2023, 127, 7216–7220. DOI: 10.1021/acs.jpca.3c03828.

Paul, I.; Konieczny, K. A.; Chavez, R.: Garcia-Garibay, M. A. Reaction amplification with a gain:Triplet exciton-mediated quantum chain using mixed crystals with a tailor-made triplet sensitizer. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA. 2024,121, e2401982121. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2401982121

Fajardo, Jr., J.:  Rowen, J. R.;  Schleif, T.; Jariwala, P.; Garcia-Garibay, Miguel A. Elusive Arylalkylcarbenes in Solution and in Crystals: Facile 1,2‑R (R= H, Ph) Migrations of 1,2,2-Triphenylethylidene.  J. Am. Chem. Soc., 2024, 146, 23221−23229.  DOI:10.1021/jacs.4c05452