Congrats to all of the lab alumni who recently graduated! We’ve been so fortunate to have worked with this talented crew of high school and undergrad interns, and we wish them the very best as they embark on their next adventures.

Undergrad Alumni
Xiaowei Chen (Rice): Cornell University (Ph.D. in Chemistry)
Madeline Fitzgerald (Davidson): UC Berkeley (Ph.D. in Chemistry)
Hang Chi (Calvin) Ho (HKUST): UCLA (Ph.D. in Chemistry)
Chenxi Liao (Nankai U): Nankai U (Ph.D. in Chemistry)
Gabrielle Martinez (CSUSM): UC Irvine (Ph.D. in Chemistry)
Wenzhuo Qin (Nankai U): Cornell University (Ph.D. in Chemistry)
Shinjin Sun (Fudan U): Fudan University (Ph.D. in Chemistry)

High School Intern Alumna
Giada Amundson (Montrose High): Oregon State University (B.S. in Chemistry)

Today Mitsui Chemicals announced that Keary was selected as a recipient of the 2024 Chemicals Catalysis Science Award for Creative Work. The award recognizes up to two researchers under the age of 37 at the time of nomination who are affiliated with a university or public research institution and have demonstrated creative achievements in the field of catalysis science research. Keary is acknowledged for the “Discovery of selective, predictable, and modular alkene functionalization methods and the development of widely used organometallic precatalysts.” He shares the 2024 award with Prof. MJ Koh from the National University of Singapore. Congratulations!

Mitsui Chemicals will be holding “Catalysis Science Forum”, where the awardees will deliver commemorative lectures that will be followed by the award ceremony. The forum will take place as a part of the “14th CSJ Chemistry Festa 2024” held by the Chemical Society of Japan.

Click here for the announcement: https://jp.mitsuichemicals.com/en/techno/csa/index.htm

This week we are welcoming three new members to the lab.

Sourav joins as a postdoc and will be working jointly with the Jazzar Lab at UCSD. He did his PhD in Prof. M. S. Maji’s lab at IIT Kharagpur and  has worked as a postdoc in the Koenigs group at RWTH Aarchen and more recently in the Szostak Lab at Rutgers University.

Calise is a visiting SURF student from UC Santa Cruz. She will be working as a joint student with the Hang Lab.

Luka is visting from Telluride High School and is doing an internship over the summer working with Madison on palladium catalysis.

Welcome!

Written in collaboration with colleagues from catalyst manufacturing and pharmaceutical process development backgrounds, the most recent review article from the lab, which appears today in ACS Catalysis, examines the emergence of non-platinum group metals (non-PGMs) as catalysts in the modern pharmaceutical industry. Congrats to the entire team: Hui and Carin from Sinocompound, Mike from AbbVie, and Anne and Keary from Scripps Research.

For a link to the open-access paper in ACS Catalysis, click here: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acscatal.4c01809

As a reminder, a ChemRxiv pre-print on this work was uploaded back in March of this year: https://chemrxiv.org/engage/chemrxiv/article-details/65fd5179e9ebbb4db940d941

Undergraduate intern Ruchira Hariharan is visiting the lab from Cornell University, where she conducts research in the lab of Prof. Song Lin. Ruchira joins the Engle lab as a SURF fellow and will be working with Al on palladium catalysis. Welcome to the group, Ruchira!