We bid Yillin and José farewell! After spending a chemistry-intense summer in Engle lab, Yillin heads back to Santa Babara, and José hops on a long flight back to Spain. It was a great joy to hear about their amazing accomplishments Ni-catalysis, in collaboration with Ziqi and Taeho, during their wrap-up talks. Everyone from the Engle lab is wishing them the best luck in their future endeavors.

Congratulations to rising G4 student Luke Oxtoby who was chosen to represent Scripps Research and the Engle Lab at the 2021 AbbVie Scholars Symposium! The event takes place this week (Thursday, August 26) in virtual format, where Luke will have the opportunity to share his research with other students from around the country and with AbbVie scientists. Way to go, Luke!

Congratulations to rising 4th year graduate student Zi-Qi Li, who has been selected for a prestigious 2021–2022 Bristol Myers Squibb Graduate Fellowship in recognition of her research on palladium- and nickel-catalyzed alkene functionalization. Zi-Qi will present her research along other graduate fellows at BMS in the spring. Way to go, Zi-Qi!

For the past 5+ years, simple alkenyl alcohol substates have been on our wish list of “ideal” substrates for directed three-component alkene difunctionalization. However, extensive efforts within our lab and by others have proven that these starting materials are especially challenging due to a number of competitive side reactions that can arise (cyclization, alcohol oxidation, alkylmetal chain-walking, etc.). In an exciting study appearing online today in J. Am. Chem. Soc., Taeho and Nana together with Bristol Myers Squibb collaborators Peter, Klement, and Hao, have demonstrated a creative approach to integrate alkenyl alcohols into three-component carboamination that hinges on judicious tuning of the leaving group on the nitrogen electrophile. By carefully modulating the LUMO energy of this reaction partner, high pathway selectivity for the desired three-component coupling can be achieved across a broad array of substrates. Congrats to the team on this awesome advance!

For a link to the published manuscript in J. Am. Chem. Soc., click here: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/jacs.1c07112.

As a reminder, a pre-print of this paper was published back in March: https://chemrxiv.org/engage/chemrxiv/article-details/60c7562e567dfebe64ec63f7

The Engle Lab is thrilled to announce that we have received an NSF CAREER award to support ongoing research in the area of Pd(II)-catalyzed C(alkenyl)–H activation. This research project will allow us to determine the catalyst properties that drive selectivity for C(alkenyl)–H activation or nucleopalladation from common Pd(II)–π-alkene intermediates, towards our long term goal of developing a toolkit for universal alkene functionalization. The grant will also support ongoing outreach activities to communicate organometallic chemistry principles to diverse audiences and provide state-of-the-art training experiences to undergraduates and high school interns. We are grateful to the National Science Foundation for supporting this project, which will run for the next five years.

For more about the CAREER program, click here: https://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=503214

To kick off the academic year, we welcome new members Dr. Amit Simlandy, Shenghua Yang, and Juntao Sun to the Engle lab!

Dr. Simlandy is here for his second postdoc; his first was with Prof. Kevin Brown at Indiana where he became the carboboration master. We are so happy to have him.

Shenghua is a Scripps veteran who did his undergraduate work in the Baran lab. We are glad we could convince him to move downstairs to join us.

After a tumultuous odyssey across land and sea, Juntao finally arrived in La Jolla to begin his PhD. His track record in the Engle lab shows that he will be publishing in no time.