The Engle lab celebrated Halloween 2025 in style with our traditional pumpkin party, featuring spooky stylings, devilish deserts, and creepy carvings. One pumpkin and one child ended up mummified by the end of the evening! Happy Halloween!

Our lab, together with collaborators at Bristol Myers Squibb, University of Pittsburgh, and Georgia Tech, has developed a new nickel-catalyzed 1,2-alkylarylation of 1,5-cyclooctadiene (COD) that enables access to previously inaccessible cyclooctene monomers bearing C(sp³) and C(sp²) substituents. This method employs alkyl-9-BBN reagents as effective transmetalating partners, maintaining a two-electron redox manifold and avoiding radical pathways incompatible with 1,5-cyclooctadiene. The resulting monomers undergo ring-opening metathesis polymerization (ROMP) to afford new polymers with tunable properties dictated by the alkyl and aryl coupling partners. DFT studies reveal that the enhanced reactivity of alkyl-9-BBN arises from destabilization of the pre-transmetalation complex, distinguishing it from less reactive alkylboronic esters. Congrats to the entire team: Anne, Aimee, and Camille from Scripps Research; Shijia from the Liu lab at the University of Pittsburgh; and Ethan from the Gutekunst lab at Georgia Tech; and Steve from BMS.

For a link to the pre-print in ChemRxiv, click here: https://chemrxiv.org/engage/chemrxiv/article-details/68e901addfd0d042d1dace4c

The Engle lab is pleased to welcome Dr. Chris Rybak, who joins Scripps Research after completing a stellar Ph.D. at Purdue University. As a member of Prof. Chris Uyeda’s lab at Purdue, Chris’s dissertation research focused on dinickel catalytic approaches to azoarenes. A lifelong midwesterner, Chris will soak in San Diego sunshine while exploring new areas of the d-block for catalytic method discovery. Welcome Dr. Rybak!

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!