Together with the labs of Rodolphe Jazzar (UCSD/CNRS) and Pierre-Adrien Payard (Université Claude Bernard Lyon), this week we report a bench-stable CuH cluster inspired by Stryker’s reagent.

Multicenter-2-electron bonds play a pivotal role in templating cluster assembly during synthesis, allowing incorporation of the CAAC ligand. The pronounced stability of the cluster arises from attenuated hydride mobility, as probed by experiment and theory. This great team effort spanned three institutions and was led by Quentin (Lyon), Skyler Mendoza (Scripps Research), and Jesse Peltier (UCSD).

For a link to pre-print on ChemRxiv, click here: https://chemrxiv.org/engage/chemrxiv/article-details/66c3a7fd20ac769e5f193252

Huge congrats to Keary, who was recognized today as one of two recipients of the 2025 Arthur C. Cope Early Career Scholar Award. Keary will deliver an award address at the 2025 Arthur C. Cope Symposium at the ACS Fall National Meeting in Washington, DC, along with the other nine Arthur C. Cope Scholars spanning early-, mid-, and late-career categories.

For the announcement in C&E News, click here: https://cen.acs.org/acs-news/ACS-announces-2025-National-Award/102/i27

For more information about the Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award, click here: https://www.acs.org/funding/awards/arthur-cope-scholar-award.html

The final, peer-reviewed version of our study describing a new method to form cyclopropanes from unactivated olefins and 1,3-dicarbonyl compounds under Pd(II)/Pd(IV) catalysis is online this week in J. Am. Chem. Soc. Owing to its unique mechanism, the method gives an unusual stereochemical outcome in which the 1,3-dicarbonyl adds to opposite faces of the C–C π-bond. Congrats to the team of collaborators from Scripps Research, University of Pittsburgh, Purdue University, and Pfizer!

For a link to the paper in J. Am. Chem. Soc., click here: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/jacs.4c07039

As a reminder, an earlier version of this paper was published as a pre-print in ChemRxiv in February 2023: https://chemrxiv.org/engage/chemrxiv/article-details/641a9863dab08ad68f818947

All good things must come to an end, and so too must the SURF program! We had so much fun hosting Ruchira and Calise this summer, so it’s bittersweet to see them wrap up their internships and return to Ithaca and Santa Cruz, respectively. We can’t wait to see what lies ahead for both of you in graduate school and beyond!

Together with collaborators from the Gutekunst lab at Georgia Tech, the Liu lab at the University of Pittsburgh, and Bristol Myers Squibb, today we report a one-step approach towards 1,2-diarylated sequence-encoded monomers that can be controllably polymerized via ring-opening metathesis polymerization (ROMP). The method allows convenient access to otherwise inaccessible polymeric materials with the modularity inspired by classical cross-coupling. Congrats to the entire team: Van, Anne, and Camille from Scripps Research; Mizhi and Ethan from Georgia Tech; Yue from the University of Pittsburgh; and Steve from BMS!

For a link to the paper in Nature Synthesis, click here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s44160-024-00618-1

What is the active form of my catalyst for a given reaction of interest? This core question remains one of the most difficult to answer due to tendency of metals and ligands to change oxidation states in situ. Together with chemists at Bristol Myers Squibb and the Blackmond lab at Scripps Research, we undertook a systematic study of bisphosphine oxidation in palladium catalysis and its ramifications in coordination chemistry and catalysis. Led by G4 student Shenghua, this comprehensive study has something for everyone—organometallic synthesis, reaction kinetics, structural characterization, and density functional theory calculations!

For a link to the ChemRxiv pre-print, click here: https://chemrxiv.org/engage/chemrxiv/article-details/66aeabbd5101a2ffa809a6fa

The Engle lab is pleased to welcome three new first-year graduate students, Françoise Aouane (ETH Zürich/HHU Düsseldorf), Aimee Schill (Brigham Young University), and Ningxi Song (National University of Singapore), who arrived in San Diego and started research in the lab this week. We are thrilled to have the chance to work with this talented bunch and eager to follow the exciting science they pursue.