Novartis has selected Keary as the recipient of the 2019 Early Career Award in Chemistry in recognition of the Engle lab’s contributions to catalytic alkene functionalization. This award provides two years of unrestricted funding to explore new research directions. Bravo, Keary and the Engle lab team!

The 2019 Engle Lab Holiday Party is in the books, featuring diverse and delicious foods from fried chicken to tamales, a spirited white elephant gift exchange, and boardgames galore. The party also doubled as a send-off for Joe, who recently defended his Ph.D. and will start 2020 in Pasadena in the lab of Prof. Jonas Peters. Congrats, Joe!

Happy holidays from our lab family to yours, and here’s to a great 2020!

Congratulations to Joe for successfully defending his thesis today! 🎓🎉 He pioneered #teamnickel and is off to postdoc with Dr. Jonas Peters @caltechedu! Good luck on this new opportunity Joe! 🌟

Appearing online this week in Nature Catalysis, our De-Wei, Yang, and team describe an unusual CuH-catalyzed cascade reaction to transform terminal alkynes into enaptioenriched 1,1-aminoboron compounds in a single step. In addition to synthetic applications of this remarkable transformation, we examined its mechanistic underpinnings to understand the origins of reactivity and selectivity. Thanks to Huiling from Prof. Peng Liu’s group at the University of Pittsburgh for a great collaboration and our colleagues Jason and Brittany from the Automated Synthesis Facility at Scripps Research. In case anyone missed it, a pre-print of this work was deposited in ChemRxiv back in April (click here).

Click here for a link to the paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41929-019-0384-6

Congrats to Van, Sri, and Mingyu, whose review article entitled, “Recent Applications of Chiral Phosphoric Acids in Palladium Catalysis,” has been accepted for publication in Org. Biomol. Chem. The article provides an overview of key reaction classes as well as different modes of co-catalysis that have emerged in this area during the past decade.

For a link to the paper, click here: https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2019/ob/c9ob02205h#!divAbstract