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).