Fresh off of the plane from Beijing, Pusu Yang arrives for a six-month research internship in the Engle Lab at Scripps. Pusu is a senior undergraduate at Nankai University, and at NKU he carries out research on rare-earth metal catalysts in the laboratory of Prof. Bingtao Guan. Having grown up in inner-Mongolia, Pusu is happy to swap the summer heat of Tianjin for the temperate climate of San Diego.
Today marks the Engle lab’s first foray into nickel catalysis. Congratulations to Joe, Van, and Mark for their paper in J. Am. Chem. Soc., which describes a new method to couple alkylzinc reagents, aryl iodides, and non-conjugated alkenes using a coordination control strategy. The work couldn’t have happened with our collaborator Jason Chen, the Director of the brand-new TSRI Automation Facility, who guided us through several challenging purifications and analyses. Special congratulations to Mark, who caps off his recent graduation from UCSD with the second paper of his undergraduate career. Click here for the link to the paper. Way to go, team!
(Not pictured: Mark)
Keary sat down with Ph.D. Trekkers for a wide ranging conversation about life as a young Assistant Professor and his professional and personal journey in science.
In a manuscript appearing online today in J. Am. Chem. Soc., Zhen, Zichen (Forrest), and Tian (May) have teamed up with computational collaborators Yanyan Wang and Prof. Peng Liu at the University of Pittsburg to describe a new method to effect three-component carboamination of unactivated alkenes. The article describes reaction optimization, substrate scope, synthetic applications toward several drug compounds, reaction kinetics, and computational studies. This works marks the first collaboration with another research group from the Engle lab—hopefully the first of many! Special congratulations to undergraduate co-authors, Forrest and May. Forrest recently completed his undergraduate degree at Nankai University and will be joining the PhD program at the Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry. Click here for a link to the manuscript. Great work, team!
(not pictured: Zichen (Forrest))
Jose Medina joins the Engle Lab, becoming the group’s newest postdoc. Jose completed his bachelor’s degree at CSU Chanel Islands and received his Ph.D. from UCLA with Prof. Neil K. Garg. In the Garg lab, Jose’s research focused on hetaryne chemistry and Heck-type cyclization reactions with amide electrophiles.
Molecular Complexity through Catalysis 