COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES 5 CHRISTINE KRESCHOLLEK protested, ‘Why are you doing this to us? Please tax us instead. We don’t want to do this. This is not what we do. Just tax us more. And all the nonprofit organizations also said, ‘Please don’t do this. The corporations don’t know anything about this field, and we don’t want to work with them. We’re fine. Thank you very much.’” Proponents believed that corporations’ efficiency and data-driven approaches could enhance NGOs’ community knowledge, leading to scalable, outcome-focused programs. However, Deo found that these partnerships are deeply troubled. Corporations prioritize quantifiable results and short-term service projects, while CSOs focus on communityspecific, inclusive approaches that resist the efficiency-focused corporate mindset. This mismatch forces CSOs to adjust their missions to align with corporate interests, which often emphasize quantifiable deliverables over complex social change. Her research offers evidence that CSR is unlikely to contribute to India’s inclusive and sustainable development. “The more that I looked at this, the more I found that it was really hard to find instances of successful partnerships in the interactions between corporations and CSOs. Partnerships were deeply dysfunctional from the perspective of the NGOs, the civil society organizations,” Deo says. “A lot of it had to do with just these incompatible social forms. They have different ways that they’re organized, and trying to make them work together is forcing a marriage between organizations that simply just don’t fit together. “To some extent, I think it’s likely a setup for failure,” she adds. “There was no choice. But also, one of the things that has ended up happening is some civil society organizations are censoring themselves because they have become dependent on this corporate money. They’re policing themselves. They’re not being as critical of corporations and of the business-centered economic development that’s happening in India. And that is a big threat to democracy.” CHEMISTRY VICIC RECOGNIZED FOR FLUORINE RESEARCH David Vicic, the Howard S. Bunn Distinguished Professor of Chemistry at Lehigh, has been selected to receive the 2025 American Chemical Society (ACS) Award for Creative Work in Fluorine Chemistry. The international award, which recognizes outstanding contributions to the advancement of fluorine chemistry, is given once annually. Vicic has co-authored 105 peerreviewed manuscripts, and his research helped provide the conceptual framework for understanding how earthabundant metals could be used to introduce small fluorinated functional groups into larger organic molecules. A building block approach that involved pairing the fluorinated groups with earth-abundant metals to make a more reactive chemical species was optimized so the fluorocarbon transfer was more reliable. Vicic showed it was possible to prepare and bottle a variety of activated and well-defined fluoroorganometallic complexes with metals such as copper, nickel, and cobalt, and study how they give up their fluorinated group to organic substrates. Vicic’s work demonstrates how the metal identity, the metal oxidation state and the ligand framework all play a role in tuning the chemistry to specific needs. The reactivity patterns identified by Vicic guided the development of new synthetic methodologies of interest to industry. One of Vicic’s fluorinated reagents has recently drawn the interest of Pfizer, who paired up with Snapdragon to synthesize it on a greater than 100 gram-scale using a continuous stirred tank reactor. Vicic first became interested in fluorine chemistry when attending an Organic Reactions & Processes Gordon Research Conference. He noticed that the attendees from the industry were very interested in the chemistry of small fluorinated groups, and he was intrigued by the fact these groups could not be manipulated in the same way as their non-fluorinated counterparts. Using his background in organometallic chemistry, his team carefully analyzed some recipes in the literature that used copper for transferring a trifluoromethyl group. By employing a key ligand, Vicic was able to show well-defined coppertrifluoromethyl complexes could be prepared and isolated and these pre-formed fluoro-organometallic species used more reliably for trifluoromethylation reactions. Vicic has since developed similar fluoro-organometallic chemistry with other earth-abundant metals, which has facilitated meaningful structural, electronic, and reactivity studies across metals in the first row of the Periodic Table. Vicic’s current efforts are focused on using metal catalysts to understand how to repurpose high-global-warmingpotential fluorinated refrigerants. David Vicic
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