Congratulations to G4 student Alena Vasquez for winning the 2022 Women Chemist Committee (WCC) Merck Research Award, presented by the American Chemical Society. Alena was selected as one of 8 award recipients nationwide from a highly competitive pool of 3rd and 4th year Ph.D. students in the fields of Organic, Chemical Biology, Analytical, Computational or Structural Chemistry, and related disciplines. As part of the award, Alena will present at the the WCC/Merck Research Symposium held in August at the 262nd ACS National Meeting in Chicago, IL.

In a paper appearing this morning in ChemRxiv, we report the Pd(II)-catalyzed coupling of nitroalkanes and alkenes using a directed carbopalladation strategy. The combined use of PdI₂ as precatalyst and HFIP as solvent proved to be uniquely effective in activating nitroalkane pronucleophiles. This finding can be leveraged in chemorthogonal activation of bis-nucleophilic coupling partners under different conditions. The resulting C(sp³)-NO₂ group in the product is a versatile functional handle that can be converted into myriad useful functional groups, granting access to product structures that are otherwise difficult to prepare. Bravo to the team: Amit, Warabhorn (Por), Hui-Qi, and John!

For a link to the ChemRxiv pre-print, click here: https://chemrxiv.org/engage/chemrxiv/article-details/61f56e5c71868defd0c2a7d5

The final peer-reviewed version of our collaborative paper with Pfizer mapping reactivity trends in the Pd(II)/Pd(IV) catalytic annulation of alkenyl amides appears online today in Angewandte Chemie International Edition. In the paper, we describe protocols for synthesizing a diverse array 5-, 6-, and 7-membered carbon/heterocycles of ambiphilic organohalides and show how changing the structure of the nucleophile and electrophile influences reactivity. Congrats to Hui-Qi, Philliipaa, and Pranali from the Scripps Research and Shouliang, Fen, Neal, Joyann, Michelle, and Indra from Pfizer Oncology Medicinal Chemistry for another great collaboration!

Click here for a link to the article in Angewandte Chemie International Edition: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/anie.202114346

As a reminder, a pre-print of the paper first appeared in ChemRxiv back in October: https://chemrxiv.org/engage/chemrxiv/article-details/6172bcd10c0480fd773f44a4