Orestes Rivada Wheelaghan

Group: Design of Organometallic Molecules and Applications

Position: Contract Professor - PhD

Contact

Tel. ext: 446214

Laboratory: L 203

Office: D 201

Email:

ORCID: 0000-0003-0381-5937

🌐Orestes_Chem

Biography

Orestes (1985, Seville), obtained his B.S. in Chemistry at the University of Oviedo and received his MSc and Ph.D. degree in inorganic chemistry at the University of Seville, under the supervision of Dr. Salvador Conejero. He worked for 2 years with Prof. David Milstein, at the Weizmann Institute of Science (Rehovot, Israel), developing iron-based green homogeneous catalysis. Later, he moved to the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (Onna-son, Japan) as a JSPS Fellow where he designed and developed multimetallic complexes to study meta–metal cooperation. From 2019 till 2022, he was a Junior MOPGA Laureate at the Laboratoire d’Electrochimie Moleculaire (Paris, France) working with the renowned group in molecular electrochemistry and electrocatalysis eMOCA, led by Prof. M. Robert, where he learned the theoretical and experimental techniques used in molecular electrochemistry. From March 2022, Orestes has stablished his research team at the Instituto the Investigaciones Químicas (IIQ), within the group DOGMA.

Research interests

Our group is focused on developing molecular electrocatalysts using cheap and earth-abundant transition metals that promote the storage of energy in chemical bonds through cathodic transformations. Specifically, our current efforts are directed towards the electroreduction reaction of carbon dioxide, eRRCO2. However, we would like to further expand our cathodic transformations to include the electrochemical oxygen reduction reaction (eORR) and the electrochemical hydrogen evolution reaction (HER). To achieve our objectives, we cover several areas of synthetic chemistry (organic, inorganic, organometallic), molecular electrochemistry and spectroscopy (UV/Vis‒NIR and IR‒spectro‒electrochemistry, SEC). Regarding electrochemical analysis, our group has the necessary instruments and tools to perform molecular electrochemistry and electrocatalysis: two potentiostats (Autolab PGSTAT 204 and 203N), as well as electrodes (Pt, Au, glassy carbon, Ag, SCE, carbon paper), polishing materials, electrochemical cells, fritted glass, SEC cells for IR and UV–vis analysis. We have our own UV–vis equipped with fibre optics and submersible probes, and several temperature circulators in the range (0 – 35º and –15 – 40º). We also have a rotating disc and rotating ring disc electrode (RDE and RRDE, Pine) in our laboratory.

Selected publications

• Samantha L. Peralta-Arriaga, Miguel Angel Martín-Neri, Carlos García Bellido, Jeremy De Freitas, Sukanta Saha, Francisco José Fernández-de-Córdova, Marc Robert, Orestes Rivada Wheelaghan*. 2025. Access to heterobimetallic MII/CuI complexes with a multichelate platform and their reactivity studies in CO2RR. Inorg. Chem. 64, 4835-4843.
• Carlos Martínez-Ceberio, Francisco José Fernández–de–Córdova, Orestes Rivada-Wheelaghan*.2025. Synthesis and Characterization of Bimetallic Copper (I) Complexes Supported by a Hexadentate Naphthyridine-Based Macrocycle Ligand. Inorg. Chem., 64, 8630-8638.
• Daniela Mendoza, Si-Thanh Dong, Nikolaos Kostopoulos, Victor Pinty, Orestes Rivada-Wheelaghan, Elodie Anxolabéhère-Mallart, Marc Robert, Benedikt Lassalle-Kaiser. 2023. In situ X-ray absorption spectroscopy in homogeneous conditions reveals interactions between CO2 and a doubly and triply reduced iron(III) porphyrin, then leading to catalysis. ChemCatChem, 15, e202201298.
• Antoine Bohn, Juan José Moreno, Pierre Thuéry, Marc Robert, Orestes Rivada–Wheelaghan*. 2023. Electrocatalytic CO2 reduction with a binuclear bis-terpyridine pyrazole-bridged cobalt complex. Chem. Eur. J. 29, e202202361.
• Niklas von Wolff*, Orestes Rivada‒Wheelaghan*, Damien Tocqueville. 2021. Molecular Electrocatalytic Hydrogenation of Carbonyls and Dehydrogenation of Alcohols. ChemElectroChem, 8, 4019 – 4027.