The Engle lab bids adieu to Pusu and Elaine with a Friday night bowling extravaganza at nearby Mira Mesa Lanes. Pusu and Elaine return to Nankai University after 6 months of super-productive research in the Engle lab with many new friends, countless memories, and a myriad of great experiences in- and outside of the lab. We’ll miss both of you greatly, but we know that you’ll go on to accomplish great things during graduate school at SIOC (Pusu) and Peking University (Elaine)!

The Engle lab’s first publication on ChemRxiv, the chemistry preprint server, is now online. This new publication describes a convenient reaction for installing two differentiated alkyl groups to a non-conjugated alkene. Congrats to the authors, Joe, Vincent, Van, and Mingyu! We look forward to feedback, suggestions, and comments from the community while the manuscript is under review. Click here for a link to the preprint.

Rohan Marsters joins the Engle Lab for a month-long internship as part of the High Tech High Internship Program. Rohan was quick to get his (gloved) hands dirty with compound purification by column chromatography. You can follow Rohan as he blogs about his experiences in the Engle lab at TSRI here.

Check out the holiday cheer around the Beckman building! Wishing you and yours a happy holiday season from the Engle lab!

The Engle lab celebrated it’s 3rd annual holiday party in style, with great food, lively conversation, and fun games. We also bid farewell to the lab’s second postdoc, Miriam, who is starting her independent research group at NUI Galway. Thanks for your myriad contributions to the group, Miriam — we will miss you dearly! Lastly (and perhaps most importantly) we also answered the age-old question of how many Ph.D. students does it take to change a lightbulb.

UG4 student Tian (May) Zeng was selected as a recipient of the 2017–2018 UCSD Physical Sciences Dean’s Undergraduate Award for Excellence. May was one of eight awardees from the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, who were selected on the basis of outstanding performance in coursework and research. Congratulation and well deserved!

The Engle lab hosted its third annual Pumpkin Carving Party this week. Everyone enjoyed a night of good food, fun games, and intricate carving. There were some beautiful designs this year that looked amazing lit up, and fun was had by all!

The Engle lab hosted a group of sophomores and juniors from Crawford High School as part of the Science Saturdays program at TSRI. As part of lab tour, members of the Engle lab discussed the fundamentals of catalysis, showcased relevant instrumentation, and facilitated hands-on demonstrations.

Everyone took a break Saturday to play paintball before visiting undergraduate Denise returned to Munich to finish her final semester.  Although Zhen’s lab coat protects him from chemicals in the lab, it didn’t help from having paintballs fly at him in the arena.  Thanks to all the members who came out and good luck to Denise in her future chemistry career!

Malkanthi Karunananda joins the Engle Lab as the newest postdoc after finishing her P.hD. at the University of Illinois Chicago with Prof. Neal Mankad.  Malkanthi is excited to bring her computational skills and fondness for glovebox chemistry to the Engle lab.