The Engle lab is pleased to welcome Lucas Kauffman, a junior at La Jolla Country Day School, as a high school intern. Working with his mentor Al, Lucas will spend the academic year investigating mechanistic approaches to organometallic catalysis. Welcome Lucas!

This week marked the completion of Jeffrey Zhang’s summer internship, and we are sad to see him go! During his three months in the Engle lab, Jeffrey made important contributions to a new project in nickel-catalysis under the mentorship of Sourav. Out of the lab, Jeffrey kept his tennis game sharp on the weekends and traveled around the West Coast to soak in the sights and scenery. Congrats on all of your accomplishments, Jeffrey! We can’t wait to follow your career back at Cambridge and beyond!

This week we are pleased to share the final peer-reviewed version in J. Am. Chem. Soc. of our study, led by Juntao Sun, unlocking the potential of copper(II) for π-Lewis acid catalysis, a reactivity paradigm typically reserved for previous metal catalysts. Already this new direction has revealed several novel transformations that we are excited to share soon. Congrats to the entire team, including Juntao, Letian, and Shenhua from scripps, and Thomas and Mithun from the Liu lab at the University of Pittsburgh.

For a link to the paper in J. Am. Chem. Soc., click here: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/jacs.5c10387

As a reminder, we shared a pre-print of this work in ChemRxiv back in March: https://chemrxiv.org/engage/chemrxiv/article-details/67a98e806dde43c9083f094e

The Engle lab is pleased to welcome Beverly Mei, a junior Biochemistry major from UCSD, as the lab’s newest member. After working with Prof. Bingren Hu in the Department of Emergency Medicine for the past two years, Beverly will now try her hand at organometallic catalysis under the mentorship of Aimee. Welcome Beverly!

This week Shili (Shirley) Fang finished her summer internship and returned to UCSB for her senior year of college. During this summer, Shirley worked together with Wen-Ji and made important contributions to the development of air-stable nickel(0) precatalysts. We are looking forward to seeing what lies in store for you in graduate school and beyond, Shirley! Thanks for a great summer!

Congrats to Ester, who has completed her postdoc fellowship, and will now begin the next chapter of her academic career in Barcelona. During her postdoc, Ester revamped the computational organic chemistry curriculum for graduate students at Scripps Research and established a new strategy for enantioselective nickel-catalyzed conjunctive cross-coupling. Thanks for your numerous contributions, and best of luck in your new adventure, Ester!

The Engle lab lab is pleased to welcome William Liu, a senior from Rancho Bernardo High School, to the lab. After spending the summer attending lab meetings and learning about organometallic chemistry, William will spend his senior year developing catalytic approaches to access privileged building blocks towards bioactive compounds with Katherine as his mentor. We look forward to working with you, William!

After giving a stellar wrap-up talk last week, Yinan Gao finishes his summer internship this week and will now make the long drive back to Minnesota to complete his his senior year at Carleton College. With outstanding mentorship from Shenghua Yang, Yinan made outstanding progress on developing new palladium catalysts for challenging C–C coupling reactions with generous financial support from Carleton’s Eugster Endowed Student Research and Internship Fund. We look forward to following Yinan’s next steps in graduate school and beyond.

Congrats to members of the Engle lab past and present for the discovery and development of air-stable Ni(0) complexes for organic synthesis, which was acknowledged with the 2025 ACS Green Chemistry Challenge Award in the academic calendar, as announced this week! Members of the Engle lab past and present, as well as collaborators from Bristol Myers Squibb and UCSD will travel to Washington, DC, next week to receive the award.

For a link to the announcement from ACS GCI, see: https://www.acs.org/green-chemistry-sustainability/funding-and-recognition/gcca/2025-awards.html

For a highlight from Scripps Research, see: https://magazine.scripps.edu/awards-and-honors/2025/online-exclusive/dean-and-professor-keary-m-engle-receives-2025-green-chemistry-challenge-award/

We are pleased to welcome Weijie Zhang, a senior undergraduate from Nankai University, who will spend 6 months at Scripps Research during this senior year. As an undergraduate research at NKU, Weijie has already accrued extensive experience in asymmetric catalysis with Profs. Lijun Xiao and Qilin Zhou, and will now bring these skills to a project centered on ligand design for palladium catalysis together with Shenghua. Looking forward to working with you this year, Weijie!