Daniel José Mindiola was born in San Cristóbal (State of Táchira), Venezuela in 1974. San Cristóbal is a city located in the far southwest of the country and about 45 minutes from Cúcuta, Colombia. It lies in a valley region in the Andes (about 700-1100 meters above sea level).
Daniel learned the basic principles of the English language by attending the bilingual school “Cristiansen Academy” (website), which was located in the city of Rubio, Venezuela. After 3rd grade he changed to María Montessori (one year), then to the catholic school “Colegio Cristo Rey” (three years, website), and finally back to Montessori to complete his last two years of education in Venezuela.
Upon entering the US with his mother in 1989, Daniel then pursued the remainder of high school at “Ovid-Elsie” (website), a small institution confined between the towns of Ovid and Elsie, Michigan. After obtaining his high school diploma in 1992, Daniel began his college education at Michigan State University (website), East Lansing, MI.
As a “Spartan”, Daniel spent the next three and a half years learning some of the principles of inorganic and bioinorganic chemistry under the auspices of Professor Kim R. Dunbar (website). During this time, Daniel studied the binding mode and chemistry of purine bases such as guanine and adenine with known anti-tumor drugs composed of Re, Rh, and Pt. During his undergraduate studies, Daniel also had the opportunity to explore the biomedical field by attending a summer internship at Harvard Medical School in the laboratories of Professor Christopher T. Walsh (website) and Professor Roberto Kolter (website), and under the supervision of Dr. Eric D. Brown (website) and Dr. Watson J. Lees (website).
After obtaining his B.S. degree in chemistry from MSU in 1996, Daniel then attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, MA. Under the guidance of Professor Christopher “Kit” Cummins (website), Daniel explored research areas such as arene extrusion reactions, and the synthesis and reactivity of low-coordinate group 5 and 6 metal complexes.
In the summer of 2000, Daniel completed his Ph. D. degree and continued work in small molecule chemistry as an NIH and FORD post-doctoral fellow in the laboratories of Professor Gregory L. Hillhouse at the University of Chicago (website). During his time at Chicago, Daniel worked in the subjects of catalytic oxidation reactions by complexed N2O, and also the chemistry of low-coordinate nickel complexes containing metal-ligand multiple bonds.
After nearly two years at Chicago, Daniel accepted an invitation to join the Chemistry Faculty at Indiana University (website) in the city of Bloomington, IN (July of 2002). In 2007 he was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure, and in 2011 to Full Professor. He was the departmental Graduate Advisor from 2008-09 and Chair of Graduate Admissions at IU-Chemistry from 2010-2013. His research work entails the design and assembly of reactive metal complexes of early metals and their role in unusual transformations such as C-H activation and C-N bond cleavage reactions. He is also interested in novel catalytic processes mediated by reactive complexes containing metal-ligand multiple bonds, but relevant to industrial processes such as steam cracking, Fischer-Tropsch, and hydrodenitrogenation. In the summer of 2013 and after 11 wonderful years in Bloomington, Daniel moved to the University of Pennsylvania where he held a Presidential Chair Professorship for 5 years before becoming the Brush Family Professor of Chemistry. Daniel is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and has been Associate Editor for the ACS journal Organometallics since 2014.
In addition to doing synthesis and demonstrations he also enjoys being a numismatist and passionately loves the sport of soccer/football (he is a big FC Barcelona fan, see pictures above at Camp Nou and the Bernabeu). Other hobbies include jogging, swimming, biking, reading literary work from one of his favorite fiction authors, the late Gabriel G. Márquez, and spending quality time with his family.
