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So bittersweet that we must bid farewell to rock star undergraduates and professional athletes Zhongqian and Houxiang. They had a great summer working with us and experiencing San Diego!

Huge congratulations to the Class of 2019! The Engle lab is incredibly proud of our recent, PhD, college, and high school graduates, who are moving on to incredible jobs, postdocs, and graduate/undergraduate programs around the world!

Graduate Students (PhD)

Dr. John Gurak, Jr.: Bristol-Myers Squibb Process Chemistry
Dr. Zhen Liu: Caltech (Postdoc, F. Arnold)

Undergrads/Visiting Undergrads

Omar Apolinar (CSUSM): Scripps Research (Ph.D. in Chemistry)
Tim Gallagher (Claremont McKenna): WWU Münster (Fulbright wtih F. Glorius)
Xiaohan Li (Nankai U): UCSB (Ph.D. in Chemistry)
Huiqi Ni (USTC): Scripps Research (Ph.D. in Chemistry)
Hanh Ngyuen (UCSD): Amgen Process Chemistry
Tianhua (Josh) Tang (Nankai U): U of Utah (Ph.D. in Chemistry)

High School Students

Nhi Ngyuen (San Marcos High Schooll): UC Berkeley
Matt Demer (San Diego Unified): UC Davis
Rohan Marsters (High Tech High International): AmeriCorps

Matt Demer and Nhi Nguyen are off to UC Davis and UC Berkeley after graduating from their respective high schools and completing their internships. Both students were highly involved in the lab over the past two years, so we will be sad to see them go. Can’t wait to see what exciting scientific discoveries these two will make in college and beyond.

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The latest work from our collaboration with Bristol-Myers Squibb was recently accepted for publication in Angewandte Chemie International Edition. This manuscript described the developments of new methods for Pd(0)-catalyzed alkene 1,2-carboboration and -silylation. Compared to prior art, these methods are much more effective with internal alkenes (including tri- and tetrasubstitued). We even show examples of dearomative 1,2-carboboration of electron-rich heterocycles. Lastly, we identified a chiral directing group that enables control of the absolute configuration of the final products. Congrats to all Engle lab coauthors, Zhen, Hou-Xiang, Jiahao, Xiaohan, and Yang, especially our three undergrad co-authors, Hou-Xiang, Jiaohao, and Xiaohan (now in the Ph.D. program at UCSB). It was awesome teaming up with BMS again for this project — thanks to Ryan and Matt for an awesome collaboration!

For a link to the paper, click here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/anie.201910304

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We are excited to share a project many years in the making. For the first time, we have succeeded in using chiral transient directing groups to enhance reactivity, control regioselectivity, and achieve stereoinduction in an intermolecular reductive Heck hydroarylation of alkenes. This transient directing group strategy obviates the directing group installation and removal steps that are common in directed alkene functionalization, representing a positive step forward in efficiency and sustainability. Congrats to all of the Engle lab authors, Luke, Zi-Qi, Van, and Ruohan, as well as our collaborators Tuğçe and Peng from the Liu lab. For a link to the pre-print, click below:

https://chemrxiv.org/articles/A_Transient_Directing_Group_Strategy_Enables_Enantioselective_Reductive_Heck_Hydroarylation_of_Alkenes/9795338

We are pleased to welcome Raul all the way from Ruben Martin’s group at ICIQ! He will be collaborating with Mingyu on alkynes of fun chemistry!

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Our lab had the honor and privilege to contribute to a special issue of the Israel Journal of Chemistry honoring 2019 Wolf Prize Awardees and catalysis legends, Professors Stephen L. Buchwald and John F. Hartwig. In this review, Zhen, Yang, and May teamed up to provide an overview of recent developments in alkene 1,2-carboboration using different transition metal catalysts. This is a fast-moving field, so it’s hard to keep up with all of the exciting developments, but hopefully this review will be a good place to start. For a link to the paper, click here.