After a two-month stay in the Engle lab, Tian-Zhang departs San Diego today to return to Nankai University just in time to begin his junior year. Tian-Zhang deepened his knowledge of organometallic chemistry and catalysis, made many new friends, and had the opportunity to explore several fun locations up and down the West Coast. Thanks to De-Wei for great mentorship throughout the summer!

After a brief lab cleanup, the Engle group made the short trip up to the Del Mar Beach, for an afternoon of grilling, swimming, cards, volleyball, and relaxing. It was a great opportunity to celebrate the arrival of several new group members and the departure of Tian-Zhang, who completes his two-month internship next month. Thanks to the social team for organizing a great day!

Tianhua (Josh) UG4 started his 6 month internship working with Mingyu G3 and has already began making some chiral phosphine ligands. Josh is excited to learn about catalysis and trying In-n-out burger.

Roman M2 begins his visiting masters program from the Glorius Lab. Roman is looking forward to enjoying the last bit of summer here in San Diego and going to the beach.

Our collaboration with Pfizer describing a γ-selective hydroarylation of alkenyl carbonyl compounds using arylboronic acid coupling partners was accepted for publication today in Chem. Sci. (click here). With this discovery for the first time we are able to use ubiquitous aryl boronic acids to install essentially any aryl group at will as the nucleophilic component in catalytic directed alkene 1,2-functionalization. Though the reaction mechanism was not a major focus at the time of our initial submission, we were encouraged by reviewers to think more about the details of this system (particularly our preliminary deuterium-incorporation experiments), and this ended up leading us along a fruitful line of inquiry that included Reaction Progress Kinetic Analysis (RPKA). This was an awesome team effort that involved critical contributions from members of our lab (Rei, Tanner, Kin, and Rohan), the Blackmond lab (David), and Pfizer (Gary, Shouliang, Mingying, Fen, and Indra). Special kudos to our high school co-author Rohan from High Tech High International, who was an intern in the lab earlier this year. In case anyone missed it, a pre-print of this work was published on ChemRxiv back in April (click here).