Congrats to Rei Matsuura and Mingyu Liu, who have capped off their second year of grad school by successfully passing their candidacy exams. Well done to both of you!

Senior members of the Engle lab are organizing the inaugural “Organometallics Bootcamp” for incoming first-year grad students, undergraduates, and guests from other groups at TSRI and neighboring universities. The bootcamp meets mornings from 8–9 AM and select evenings, and it covers topics ranging from basic structure and bonding to state of the art cross-coupling methods. Contact keary(at)scripps.edu if you are interested in participating.

Congratulations to rising G4 student Joseph Derosa on being chosen to participate in the 2018 AbbVie Scholars Symposium! The event takes place on Friday, August 17, at AbbVie’s Corporate Headquarters in North Chicago, Illinois. Way to go, Joe!

MilliporeSigma has begun distributing the PPA and PAQ directing groups, which the Engle lab first described at the end of 2017. Thanks to MilliporeSigma for helping to make these useful auxiliaries more readily available to end-users across the world.

PPA directing group for amine substrates:
https://www.sigmaaldrich.com/catalog/product/aldrich/901251?lang=en&region=US

PAQ directing group for carboxylic acid substrates:
https://www.sigmaaldrich.com/catalog/product/aldrich/901250?lang=en&region=US

Huge congrats to rising G3 student Rei Matsuura who has been selected for the 2018 Honjo International Scholarship, which will provide financial support for the remainder of her graduate studies in the Engle group. As per the organization’s website, the Honjo Scholarship Foundation provides scholarships to bright students who have the potential to become outstanding leaders to contribute to the peaceful development of the global community. Way to go, Rei!

Congratulations to rising G4 student, Zhen Liu, who was selected for the prestigious 2018–2019 Bristol-Myers Squibb Graduate Fellowship in Synthetic Organic Chemistry. As part of the program. Zhen will present his research at the upcoming Bristol-Myers Squibb Chemistry Awards Symposium, which will be held in the spring of 2019 at the BMS research site in Lawrenceville, New Jersey. The entire Engle lab is extremely grateful to BMS for their support. Way to go, Zhen!

Tian Zhang is joining us from Nankai University and will be working with De Wei (PD2). He is looking forward to learning some copper chemistry while taking the occasional break to go catch pokemon outside on pokemon GO.

Ziyang (Nick) will be joining us from USTC on a summer internship and will be working with Tanner (G1). Ziyang is excited to learn some glovebox techniques and try out surfing in San Diego.

High School Research Intern, Nhi, joins the lab for the summer. Nhi will be working with Rei (G2) and has already started running some reactions!

Today our lab reports a new method for hydroarylation of aliphatic and heteroatom-substituted terminal alkenes with (hetero)aryl iodides via a reductive a Heck coupling approach.  A description of the work is available as a pre-print on ChemRxiv (click here).  This reaction is trivial to set up, as it can be performed on the benchtop and uses exclusively reagents that are commercially available and commonly available in a standard organic chemistry lab. The transformation is notable for its compatibility with a myriad of functional groups, including those that are potentially reductively sensitive (epoxides, ketones, aldehydes, etc.) as well various aza-heterocycles commonly required in drug discovery. Key to the successful of this reaction is use of a high PPh₃:Pd (10:1) ratio to suppress undesired beta-hydride elimination. Kudos to John who took on this significant challenge single-handedly and overcame numerous obstacles to bring this idea to fruition!

The Engle lab celebrates its third lab-iversary at Scripps. Thanks to all coworkers for another awesome year of science and many fun memories! Here’s to another great year ahead.