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!

We are excited to welcome first-year graduate student Jaehan Bae to the Engle lab. Jaehan joins that PhD program at Scripps from Chung-Ang University, where we was a member of Prof. Eun Jin Cho’s research laboratory focusing on nickel and photoredox catalysis. We are excited to see what cool new projects Jaehan will pursue in graduate school!

We are pleased to announce that the 2025 edition of our annual Organometallics Bootcamp begins next week. The short course is targeted to senior undergraduates and incoming graduate students, and we also welcome participation from chemists in industry, high school students, or anyone looking to grow their knowledge of organometallic chemistry. The course is highly flexible and accomodates in-person or virtual participation, synchronously or asynchronously.

Click the link here to register: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfCCYK6HqOKLONaOyzYVJ7vX6s78egzFLMCa-U1qwxQ_S7Gaw/viewform?usp=header

After a fantastic six weeks, we bid farewell to our high school intern Mayia Wagner, who heads back home to complete her senior year at Montrose High School in Colorado. In the Engle lab, Maiya developed new synthetic methods for accessing materials and medicines. Thanks to the Pinhead Institute for supporting this internship program and to Madison for great mentorship throughout the summer!

For a link to Maiya’s blog tracker her summer experience, click here: https://www.pinheadinstitute.org/category/intern-blogs/2025-interns/maiya-wagner/

This week marked the last days for two awesome colleagues, Evan Morgan and Alejandro (Alex) Suárez Lustres, who have spent the last few months in the Engle lab. Evan wraps us his postbac stay and will move to the Bay Area to take up a position as a medicinal chemist at Gilead. Alex will return to his home institution, University of Santiago de Compostela (Spain), where he will wrap up his Ph.D. with Profs. Carlos Saá and Jesús Varela over the course of the next year. We celebrated their time in the lab with food and festivities. Thanks to both Evan and Alex for making crucial scientific contributions and for being great colleagues!

This week the Engle lab celebrated 10 incredible years at Scripps Research with a surprise party, including a video montage, cake, and everyone’s favorite food—Hawaiian BBQ! Looking forward to several more decades ahead of research, teaching, and mentorship!