High schooler Rohan begins his second summer internship with us! This time around, he’s working with Mingyu! Check out his blog to follow his progress during the next few weeks (click here).

Lea joined us ten weeks ago from Germany to work with Andrew and learn about catalysis! Those weeks just blew by and she recently gave her wrap-up talk before heading home. Thanks for being such a fantastic chemist to work with and for being a great friend. We’ll miss you!

Keary was recognized as one of 13 national recipients of the 2019 Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award. The citation from the Dreyfus Foundation website reads, “These young faculty have each created an outstanding independent body of scholarship and are deeply committed to education. The frontier accomplishments of these award recipients span the broad range of contemporary research in the chemical sciences.” Congratulations to Keary and the whole Engle lab on this recognition of accomplishments in research and education.

Congrats to incoming postdoc, Phillippa Cooper, who recently received a highly competitive Lindemann Trust Fellowship from the English-Speaking Union to fund her future research in the Engle lab at Scripps Research. Phillippa is currently completing her Ph.D. in Chemistry at the University of Bristol in the lab of Prof. John Bower, where she is developing iridium-catalyzed C–H functionalization reactions. Congratulations to Phillippa on this recognition. We are looking forward to having you join the group!

The Engle lab celebrated the successful PhD defense of Dr. John Gurak! He was our very first student and it’s been an honor to work with him these past four years. He will soon be off to join the process department at Bristol-Myers Squibb!!

Congratulations to postdoc Malkanthi Karunananda on winning the competitive TSRI Society of Fellows Travel Award to fund her upcoming poster at the Gordon Research Seminar and Conference in Organometallic Chemistry, which will be held this summer in Newport, Rhode Island.

Way to go, Malkanthi!

Today, Tanner and Zi-Yang (Nick) report a simple and practical method for N-alkylation of phosphinic (thio)amides using primary and secondary alcohols as the alkylating agents. The reaction is compatible with a wide variety of functional groups and employs a commercially available catalyst, Ru-MACHO, which was kindly donated to our lab from Takasago for the purposes of this study. Congrats to both authors, and special props to undergraduate co-first-author, Nick. This paper, which is now available online in Tetrahedron, is part of a special series celebrating Ryan Shenvi’s 2019 Tetrahedron Young Investigator Award. Click here for a link to the paper.

Congratulations to Claremont McKenna College senior Tim Gallagher, who has been selected for a Fulbright Fellowship to Germany! Tim joined the Engle lab at Scripps Research during the summer after his junior year (2018), following two years of research experience in the group of Prof. Anna Wenzel at CMC. In the Engle lab, Tim worked under the mentorship of Van Tran studying new conjunctive cross-coupling reactions with nickel, which then became the subject of his senior thesis at CMC. As a Fulbright Fellow, Tim will spend the next academic year in Münster, Germany, where he will carry out research on arene hydrogenation in the laboratory of Prof. Frank Glorius at WWU Münster. We can’t wait to see photos of your time in Germany. Way to go, Tim!

Congratulations to CSU San Macros senior and former SURF student Omar Apolinar, who has been selected for a 2019 NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. After working for two year with Prof. Robert Iafe at CSUSM, Omar joined the Engle lab last summer as part of the NSF-sponsored SURF program at Scripps Research. Under the mentorship of Mingyu Liu, Omar studied directed catalytic alkene and alkyne functionalization, and his work on asymmetric carbofunctionalization of alkenes was published earlier this year (Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2019, 58, 3923). Luckily for us, Omar will return to Scripps Research this fall to begin his Ph.D., and we are all looking forward to welcoming him back. Way to go, Omar! Click here for a link to a full list of awardees.

Today in a pre-print on ChemRxiv, we describe a highly unique cascade hydrofunctionalization process mediated by a chiral CuH catalyst. This multicomponent reaction transforms terminal alkynes into enantioenriched 1,1-aminoboronates in a single step, streamlining access to this emerging class of pharmacophores. We present preliminary experimental and computational data that sheds light on the reaction mechanism and origins of selectivity.  Congrats to all of the authors from the Engle lab (De-Wei, Yang, Tian-Zhang, and Xin, Automated Synthesis Facility (Jason and Brittany), and Liu lab at Pittsburgh (Huiling)! Click here for a link to the paper.