About

Christo Sevov is a professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at The Ohio State University. Born in Sofia, Bulgaria, he moved to the United States at a young age and spent his formative years in South Bend, Indiana. He earned his B.S. in 2009 from the University of Notre Dame, where he worked with Prof. Olaf Wiest on photocatalyzed cycloaddition reactions. Sevov completed his Ph.D. in 2014, beginning his studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign with Prof. John Hartwig and later transferring to the University of California Berkeley, focusing on the development and mechanistic study of metal-catalyzed additions of C–H, N–H, and O–H bonds across alkenes. Following his doctoral work, he conducted postdoctoral research with Prof. Melanie Sanford at the University of Michigan, where he applied organic chemistry approaches to energy storage, specifically designing solvated battery materials for redox flow batteries. Sevov joined The Ohio State University faculty in July 2017 as an assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry. His research aims to develop strategies at the interface of homogeneous catalysis and electrochemistry for sustainable utilization of electrical energy from renewable sources, including the development of electrochemically-driven organic synthesis methods, valorization of biofeedstocks and waste recycling, and large-scale energy storage systems. His work emphasizes replacing toxic, explosive, or expensive reagents with inexpensive and benign additives, enabling safe, sustainable, and scalable organic synthesis and energy storage solutions.

Research topics

• Chemistry
• Materials science
• Combinatorial chemistry
• Crystallography
• Organic chemistry

Selected publications

• Reductive Arylation of PVC by Dual-Metal Catalyzed Cross-Electrophile Coupling

  Journal of the American Chemical Society · 2026-01-02 · 1 citations

  articleSenior authorCorresponding

  Poly(vinyl chloride) (PVC) is one of the world's most widely produced thermoplastics. Its wide range of properties depend upon high loadings of noncovalent additives that are susceptible to migration and leaching. Recent efforts have sought to address this material flaw by covalently attaching additives directly onto the backbone of PVC. However, known grafting reactions of PVC are limited to alkylation or nucleophilic substitution reactions and are not applicable to arylation. This synthetic limitation precludes the covalent grafting of aromatic additives like colorants, antioxidants, and flame retardants onto PVC. This work details a mild and controllable methodology for electroreductive arylation of PVC with a range of aryl bromides. The reaction is catalyzed by a combination of Co and Ni complexes to enable on-bond arylation of PVC with functional aromatic architectures that are common additives in formulations of commercial PVC plastics. The simple transformation can be applied directly to postconsumer PVC on multigram scale without chain scission. The arylated PVCs exhibit excellent chemical resistance without leaching of the aromatic additives.

  PublisherDOI

• Cyclometallated Co(III) Complexes with Lowest-Energy Charge Transfer Excited States Accessible with Visible Light

  Journal of the American Chemical Society · 2025-04-10 · 9 citations

  article

  The Co(III) complexes, cis-[Co(ppy)2(L)]PF6, where ppy = 2-phenylpyridine and L = bpy (2,2′-bipyridine; 1), phen (1,10-phenanthroline; 2), and DAP (1,12-diazaperylene; 3), are reported and their photophysical properties were investigated to evaluate their potential as sensitizers for applications that include solar energy conversion schemes and photoredox catalysis. Calculations show that cyclometallation in the cis-[Co(ppy)2(L)]PF6 series affords strong Co(dπ)/ppy(π) orbital interactions that result in a Co/ppy(π*) highest occupied molecular orbital (HOMO) and a lowest unoccupied molecular orbital (LUMO) localized on the diimine ligand, L(π*). Complexes 1–3 exhibit relatively invariant oxidation potentials, whereas the reduction event is dependent on the identity of the diimine ligand, L, consistent with the theoretical predictions. For 3 a broad Co/ppy(π*) → L(π*) metal/ligand-to-ligand charge transfer (ML-LCT) absorption band is observed in CH3CN with a maxima at 507 nm, extending beyond 600 nm. Upon excitation of the 1ML-LCT transition, transient absorption features consistent with the population of a 3ML-LCT excited state with lifetimes, τ, of 3.0 ps, 4.6 and 42 ps for 1, 2 and 3 in CH3CN respectively are observed. Upon irradiation with 505 nm, 3 is able to reduce methyl viologen (MV2+), an electron acceptor commonly in photocatalytic schemes. To our knowledge, 3 represents the first heteroleptic molecular Co(III) complex that combines cyclometallation with a diimine ligand with lowest-lying metal-to-ligand charge transfer excited states able to undergo photoinduced charge transfer with low-energy green light. As such, the structural design of 3 represents an important step toward d6 photosensitizers based on earth abundant metals.

  PublisherDOI

• Electroreductive Borylation of Chloroalkanes and Polyvinyl Chloride Plastics

  Journal of the American Chemical Society · 2025-06-25 · 7 citations

  articleSenior authorCorresponding

  Covalent modification of poly(vinyl chloride) (PVC) with additives that are typically mixed into PVC plastics would eliminate migration and leaching of these essential plasticizers and stabilizers. This report details an electroreductive methodology for the borylation of PVC, as well as of simple chloroalkanes, using inexpensive boron sources. Mechanistic studies implicate C–B bond formation from the reaction of a boron electrophile and an organomagnesium intermediate. While conventional Grignard formation from employing Mg0 metals failed, Grignard intermediates were rapidly generated from chloroalkanes and highly reactive Mg deposits generated at the cathode during electrolysis. Translation of this methodology from small- to macromolecular chloroalkanes, like PVC, required the addition of surfactants that disrupt the micellar conformation of PVC in THF. This approach exposes the C–Cl bonds for activation at the cathodic surface. These operationally simple conditions enabled borylation of PVC on a multigram scale without chain scission. Finally, the borylated PVCs were further elaborated into PVCs with various functional groups using robust synthetic methods to create materials with distinct bulk properties, including improved thermal stability and increased plasticity.

  PublisherDOI

• Nickel-mediated aerobic C(sp2)–nucleophile coupling reactions for late-stage diversification of aryl electrophiles

  Nature Synthesis · 2025-01-16 · 6 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Evaluation of Elementary Steps in Csp ² –Csp ³ Cross-Electrophile Coupling Reactions Mediated by a Common Ni Complex

  Journal of the American Chemical Society · 2025-12-16 · 3 citations

  articleSenior authorCorresponding

  ) bonds from available substrates. Key elementary steps of the reaction, such as oxidative addition and radical coupling, have been individually investigated with discrete complexes, but no studies exist that probe these and other key steps along the reaction pathway from a single, synthetically relevant platform. This work leverages the accessibility of persistent organonickel complexes to benchmark the effects of electronic and steric parameters of complexes and substrates on the rates of oxidative addition, the stabilities of organonickel intermediates, and the rates of radical coupling. Insights into the rates of oxidative addition help to rationalize synthetic limitations that are frequently encountered in Ni-catalyzed methodologies. Finally, the aggregate effects of the independently studied steps were evaluated by measuring the overall yields of the combinatorial coupling reactions. These insights established guidelines for selecting Ni complexes for XEC reactions of substrates that are challenging to couple.

  PublisherDOI

• Nickel-mediated aerobic Csp–nucleophile coupling

  Trends in Chemistry · 2025-03-17

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Persistent organonickel complexes as general platforms for Csp2–Csp3 coupling reactions

  Nature Chemistry · 2024-04-29 · 22 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Electrocatalytic Grafting of Polyvinyl Chloride Plastics

  ChemRxiv · 2024-08-12 · 1 citations

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  Polyvinyl chloride (PVC) plastics require high loadings of plasticizers and stabilizers to achieve commercially useful bulk properties. However, these non-covalent additives leach from PVC over time, resulting in the loss of their tailored functionality. This work details the electrocatalytic functionalization of PVC to covalently graft plasticizing additives directly onto the polymer backbone. Here, mechanistic insights guided the design of electrocatalysts capable of modifying C–Cl bonds of PVC under mild conditions with high selectivity while suppressing side reactions such as elimination and chain scission. Functional groups that mimic PVC plasticizers are covalently installed into the backbone of PVC to create new materials with distinct bulk properties from the original polymer. The degree of polymer grafting is easily controlled by simply changing the redox capacity that is passed during electrolysis. This strategy is employed to create chemically- and leach-resistant PVC materials by directly electrolyzing mixtures of consumer PVC products.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Electrocatalytic grafting of polyvinyl chloride plastics

  Chem · 2024-09-19 · 18 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Reductive alkyl–alkyl coupling from isolable nickel–alkyl complexes

  Nature · 2024-08-29 · 27 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• John F. Hartwig

  University of California, Berkeley

  34 shared

• Melanie S. Sanford

  University of Michigan–Ann Arbor

  30 shared

• Jeffrey S. Moore

  University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  14 shared

• Joaquín Rodríguez‐López

  University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  11 shared

• Monique E. Cook

  Argonne National Laboratory

  10 shared

• Koen H. Hendriks

  Eindhoven University of Technology

  9 shared

• Jianrong Steve Zhou

  Peking University

  9 shared

• Brett A. Helms

  Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

  8 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Chemistry

  University of California Berkeley

  2014

• B.S., Chemistry and Biochemistry

  University of Notre Dame

  2009

Awards & honors

• John S. Swenton Award for Outstanding Teaching