Brock University’s Distinguished Professor designation is a lifetime appointment recognizing outstanding achievement in each recipient’s academic discipline. This series of articles highlights this year’s recipients. Read more about the award and its recipients on The Brock News.

A gifted book was the unexpected catalyst that changed Georgii Nikonov’s academic focus and set him on a path to becoming one of the world’s top scientists.

The Brock University Professor of Chemistry had his sights set on becoming a geographer at a young age. With a deep knowledge of everything from mountains and straits to economic systems and political conflict, he planned to study geography and history. But when his elementary school principal encouraged him to explore chemistry, his interests shifted.

The principal gave Nikonov a book that explored chemistry on a higher level and was “much more interesting than the school textbook,” he says.

He was especially intrigued by a chapter on catalysis, the chemical phenomenon in which the rate of a chemical reaction is increased by adding a substance called a catalyst.

During a chemical reaction, the bonds between the atoms in molecules are broken and then recombine to create new molecules. Catalysts make this easier because they lower the energy required for a chemical reaction to occur. The catalyst reforms at the end of the reaction, so it can be used again and again.

“It’s almost like a miracle,” says Nikonov. “When a chemical reaction goes really badly — meaning you spend a lot of energy and use harsh conditions, such as high temperature and/or pressure, leading to many unwanted products — and then you add a sort of philosopher’s stone and magic happens: the reaction goes well, it goes fast and it goes clean.”

While it’s been a long time since Nikonov’s elementary school days, he maintains his curiosity in catalysis. Early in his 19-year Brock career, his fundamental research into non-conventional bonds in transition metal compounds led Nikonov and his Brock graduate students into a serendipitous discovery that their “weird compounds can actually serve as catalysts,” he says.

“The students made some interesting compounds very efficiently and cheaply by catalysis, and we discovered some catalytic reactions that hadn’t been known,” he says.

Nikonov held a world record in one of these reactions for more than a decade.

“I was literally the only person in the world who could do it,” he says.

Nikonov shifted his focus to studying mechanisms of chemical reactions, which include the step-by-step details at each stage in a chemical reaction that explain how the reaction works.

A paradoxical conclusion that Nikonov made while studying mechanisms of transition metal catalysis was that expensive transition metals, like gold and platinum, may not be needed to perform catalysis. Instead, the job could be done with the main group elements such as magnesium, aluminum and silicon.

These main group elements are not only more abundant in nature and less expensive than transition metals, but they are also less toxic and more benign.

Since then, Nikonov has been experimenting with using main group elements as catalysts, which has been somewhat successful, but not as effective as transitional metals.

Catalysis is an important part of the economy, so to be able to perform it with less expensive and less toxic materials is very desirable, says Nikonov.

“Many people don’t realize that a quarter, sometimes 30 per cent of the gross domestic product of industrialized countries, like Canada, is because of chemistry. More than 85 per cent of these chemicals produced — which we use to create products for use in pharmaceuticals, clothing and agriculture — require catalysis,” he says.

Nikonov’s current research also involves fundamental studies in bond activation, including studying atoms in extremely low oxidation states.

“We basically put main group elements in some extreme situations,” he says. “We pump energy into them chemically, we make them extremely reactive and then we study how they activate molecules. We’re trying to mimic what happens in transition metal catalysis by using main group elements.”

Nikonov says he often feels like an explorer in unchartered territory, not knowing where his research will bring him, but knowing that the new knowledge will become useful over the years.

The publications he has produced have landed him on Stanford University’s list of the world’s top one per cent of scientists with the most citations.

“You never know when we will have a next breakthrough into actual application,” he says. “It is impossible to predict the next direction.”