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)