Dr. Heather A. Spinney, The Dow Chemical Company
Seminar Title: Applications of highly electron-deficient bisphosphoramidite ligands in hydroformylation catalysis
Heather Spinney is a Senior Research Scientist in the Chemical Science Capability of Core Research & Development. Her research activities involve the design and synthesis of new ligands for transition metal catalysts, catalyst screening experiments, and mechanistic studies of reactions of interest. For her mechanistic work, Heather has developed expertise in high pressure NMR spectroscopy (HP-NMR) and has helped build the capability at Dow. Her work has contributed to programs with various businesses, including Oxygenated Solvents, Hydrocarbons, Home & Personal Care, Polyurethanes, and Plastics & Specialty Packaging. Heather joined Dow in June, 2010.
Heather is very active in the external Organometallic Chemistry community. She was the chair of the 2023 Gordon Research Conference on Organometallic Chemistry and sits on the editorial advisory board for the ACS Journal Organometallics. Heather was recently recognized as a 2021 Rising Star by the ACS Women Chemists Committee (WCC). The award is granted to exceptional early- to mid-career chemists across all fields at the national level. In 2019, Heather received an Emerging Leader Award from the Society of Women Engineers (SWE).
Originally hailing from the Maritime Provinces of Canada, Heather earned a B.Sc. degree in Chemistry at Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick and a Ph.D. in Inorganic Chemistry from Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Prior to joining Dow, she completed two postdoctoral fellowship positions at The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and The University of Ottawa, Canada. Her doctoral and postdoctoral research involved both main group and transition metal coordination chemistry.
