The Engle lab hosted its third annual Pumpkin Carving Party this week. Everyone enjoyed a night of good food, fun games, and intricate carving. There were some beautiful designs this year that looked amazing lit up, and fun was had by all!

The Engle lab hosted a group of sophomores and juniors from Crawford High School as part of the Science Saturdays program at TSRI. As part of lab tour, members of the Engle lab discussed the fundamentals of catalysis, showcased relevant instrumentation, and facilitated hands-on demonstrations.

Everyone took a break Saturday to play paintball before visiting undergraduate Denise returned to Munich to finish her final semester.  Although Zhen’s lab coat protects him from chemicals in the lab, it didn’t help from having paintballs fly at him in the arena.  Thanks to all the members who came out and good luck to Denise in her future chemistry career!

Malkanthi Karunananda joins the Engle Lab as the newest postdoc after finishing her P.hD. at the University of Illinois Chicago with Prof. Neal Mankad.  Malkanthi is excited to bring her computational skills and fondness for glovebox chemistry to the Engle lab.

In a communication appearing online today in J. Am. Chem. Soc., the Engle lab and Liu lab (U Pittsburgh) describe a new family of removable tridentate directing groups that enable regiocontrol in nucleopalladation, stabilizing otherwise elusive 6-membered palladacycles. Congrats to the whole team: Miriam, Rei, Josh, John, and De-Wei from Scripps; and Yanyan and Gang from Pitt. Special shout out to undergraduate co-author Josh Turnbull, who made several key contributions and has recently started in the PhD program at UC Berkeley. Thanks to the Liu lab for another great collaboration! Way to go, everyone! Click here for a link to the paper.

(not pictured: John, Josh, and Gang)