Solid catalysts incorporating transition metals are important in industry, providing cost- effective syntheses, ease of separation from products, and control of selectivity. The metal is often expensive and thus often constitutes only about one percent of the catalyst mass, being highly dispersed on a high-area support. Dispersed metals in industrial catalysts are usually highly nonuniform in structure and challenging to characterize, and consequently relationships between structure and catalyst performance are typically less than fully understood. Our approach to the investigation of supported metal catalysts involves the synthesis of uniform catalytic sites that have essentially molecular character. Supported molecular catalysts can be characterized spectroscopically to provide fundamental understanding of the catalyst structure under reactive atmospheres, and thereby determination of structural changes of working catalysts that can be correlated with the catalytic activity and selectivity. The sample characterization techniques used in this work included infrared (IR), extended X-ray absorption fine structure (EXAFS), and X-ray absorption near edge structure (XANES) spectroscopies, as well as gas chromatography (GC) and mass spectrometry (MS) to characterize reaction products. The catalysts were prepared from the organometallic precursor Rh(C2H4)2(C5H7O2) and the supports MgO and zeolite HY. These catalysts initially incorporated site-isolated, mononuclear rhodium complexes on the supports. The complexes on MgO were treated in H2 at elevated temperatures to form the smallest supported rhodium clusters--rhodium dimers. These catalysts are essentially molecular in character and allowed tailoring of the rhodium nuclearity, the ligands bonded to the rhodium, and the rhodium-support interface. The catalysts incorporated mononuclear Rh(C2H4)2 and Rh(CO)2 complexes; dimeric rhodium clusters with ethyl ligands, and dimeric rhodium clusters with CO ligands. These were tested for the hydrogenation of ethylene. Rhodium in various forms is highly active for catalytic hydrogenation of olefins. However, rhodium has been little investigated for diene hydrogenation, because, like other noble metals in the form of supported clusters or particles, it is unselective. We postulated that new catalytic chemistry of rhodium could emerge if the catalytic species were essentially molecular so that they could be tuned by the choice of the rhodium nuclearity and ligands. Thus, we investigated the influence of the following catalyst design variables on the activity and selectivity of supported rhodium for 1,3-butadiene hydrogenation: (a) the metal nuclearity, ranging from one to several; (b) the electron-donor properties of the support (MgO vs. zeolite Y); and (c) other ligands on the rhodium, including reactive hydrocarbons (ethylene or ethyl) and CO. The data show that extremely small MgO-supported rhodium clusters that are partially carbonylated are highly active and selective for the hydrogenation of 1,3-butadiene to give n-butenes. The support, the rhodium nuclearity, and the ligands on rhodium are crucial to the catalyst selectivity, transforming a metal that is typically regarded as unselective for 1,3-butadiene hydrogenation into one that is highly selective even at high conversions. Transition metals in complexes and clusters tend to aggregate to form of more stable, bulk particles under reactive atmospheres, causing catalyst deactivation. We investigated the initial steps of the aggregation of supported metal species that were highly dispersed on MgO and zeolite HY, synthesizing samples that incorporated supported rhodium complexes bonded to ligands with different reactivities (including the support), and then spectroscopically investigated the formation of extremely small rhodium clusters in the presence of H2. The stability of the rhodium complexes and the stoichiometry of the surface-mediated transformations are regulated by the support and the other ligands bonded to the rhodium, being prompted at a lower temperature with zeolite HY than the better electron-donor MgO when the rhodium complexes incorporate ethylene ligands, but occurring more facilely on the MgO than on the zeolite when the ligands are CO. The preparation of highly uniform rhodium dimers is possible. We infer that results such as those presented here may be useful in guiding the design of stable, highly dispersed supported metal catalysts by choice of the support and other ligands on the metal.