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.

In a communication appearing online today in J. Am. Chem. Soc., the Engle lab and Liu lab (U Pittsburgh) describe a new family of removable tridentate directing groups that enable regiocontrol in nucleopalladation, stabilizing otherwise elusive 6-membered palladacycles. Congrats to the whole team: Miriam, Rei, Josh, John, and De-Wei from Scripps; and Yanyan and Gang from Pitt. Special shout out to undergraduate co-author Josh Turnbull, who made several key contributions and has recently started in the PhD program at UC Berkeley. Thanks to the Liu lab for another great collaboration! Way to go, everyone! Click here for a link to the paper.

(not pictured: John, Josh, and Gang)

Congratulations to Keary, who was selected as the 2017 Society of Fellows Outstanding Mentor! The award is given to one TSRI faculty member on the basis of recommendations from current and former group members. Awesome recognition and well deserved!

For a write-up in TSRI News and Views, click here.

We are thrilled to announce that the Engle lab’s second postdoc, Miriam O’Duill, has accepted a position in the Chemistry Department at NUI Galway and will start her independent academic career in January 2018. We can’t wait to see awesome chemistry from the O’Duill group soon! Best of luck on this next adventure, Miriam!