Keary has been named as one of the five recipients of the 2020 Amgen Young Investigator Award, as selected by Amgen’s Therapeutic Discovery and Drug Substance Technologies Departments. Congratulations to Keary and the other awardees!

• Keary Engle, Ph.D., Scripps Research Institute
• Jean-Philippe Julien, Ph.D., University of Toronto
• Alison Narayan, Ph.D., University of Michigan
• Sergey Pronin, Ph.D., University of California Irvine.
• David Veesler, Ph.D., University of Washington

The five speakers will receive funding to support research from Amgen and will participate in a virtual Young Investigator Award Symposium this fall.

Team Nickel continues to be hard at work during this challenging summer, and today we report the latest chapter in our work towards diverse regiodivergent alkene functionalization in collaboration with Liu group at the University of Pittsburgh. Specifically, we discovered that a systematically tuned Pyrox ligand is able to overcome the inherent tendency of alkenyl carboxylic acids to react in an anti-Markovnikov fashion in nickel(0)-catalyzed hydroarylation and -alkenylation with oranoboronic acids, instead favoring formation of the anti-Markovnikov product. Great work by all of the authors—Zi-Qi, Ruohan, Van, and Yang from our group, and Yue from the Liu lab.

For a link to the pre-print, click here: https://chemrxiv.org/articles/preprint/Ligand-Controlled_Regiodivergence_in_Nickel-Catalyzed_Hydroarylation_and_Hydroalkenylation_of_Alkenyl_Carboxylic_Acids/12650009

Not even a pandemic can slow down Team Nickel, who report a versatile method to effect 1,2-diarylation of diverse alkenyl amine derivatives, including those bearing challenging 1,1- and 1,2-disubstitution patterns. Key to the success of this work was the discovery of sulfonamides as uniquely effective groups for directing the nickel catalysts and then subsequently activating the nitrogen atom for diverse N-functionalization reactions.

For a link to the pre-print, click here: https://chemrxiv.org/articles/Sulfonamide_Directivity_Enables_Ni-Catalyzed_1_2-Diarylation_of_Diverse_Alkenyl_Amines/12642803