Porous Organic Polymers (POPs) have emerged as a new class of porous materials with intriguing properties. Thanks to virtually unlimited number of molecular building blocks that can be used for their synthesis, the reported POPs showed very diverse structures, tunable pore sizes and volumes as well as high specific areas, that allowed their use in a wide range of applications such as absorption, gas storage and separation, catalysis, energy storage or drug delivery.

My talk will focus on synthesis, characterization and application as heterogeneous catalysts of novel 2D and 3D-based POPs. A first series involve, tetraphenyladamantane and 9,9'-spirobifluorene -based 3D materials that were obtained by Sonogashira cross-coupling. Further, 2D POPs containing copper(I)-N-heterocyclic carbene (NHCs) units were obtained by copper(I) catalyzed alkyne-azide cycloaddition reactions (CuAAC). These materials showed excellent catalytic activity, without and after doping with a transition metal, in various transformations including hydrogenation, C-C and C-N bond formation reactions. Structural analysis showed that residual metallic species coming from the catalysts used for POPs synthesis were self-entrapped within the target framework and thus, the they can directly mediate, without any post-synthetic treatment, other cross-coupling reactions.