Together with the Sharpless, Blackmond, and Liu labs, as well as the teams at Enamine and Pfizer, in a ChemRxiv pre-print this week, we explore a family of intriguing chemicals with largely unannotated reactivity, alkyl sulfonyl fluorides. Under Pd^II/Pd^IV catalysis, we unlock the ambiphilic reactivity of alkyl l sulfonyl fluorides with olefins to access unique substituted cyclopropanes.

This was a fun collaboration spanning many years made possible a by a great team, including Yilin Cao, Warabhorn (Por) Rodphon, Turki Alturaifi, Al Vicente Riano Lisboa, Hermione Ren, Job Struijs, Hui-Qi Ni, and several industrial collaborators. Congrats!

For a link to the ChemRxiv pre-print, click here: https://chemrxiv.org/engage/chemrxiv/article-details/672b9b3cf9980725cf547804

Madison, Yilin, and Keary were featured in two local TV segments promoting Scripps Research Discovery Day at Fleet Science Center, November 10, 2024, noon-4:00 pm. In celebration of Scripps Research’s centennial, the event will feature >50 graduate students and postdocs, 12 different hands-on learning activities, and topics ranging from neuroscience to drug discovery. Check it out!

After several months working jointly between the Engle, Blackmond, and Baran labs on organonickel catalysis, Job Struijs wraps up his time at Scripps Research. Job made a huge impact during a short time bringing a mechanistic perspective to numerous different projects. Job will now return to Oxford to complete his D.Phil. with Profs. Veronique Gouverneur and Simon Aldridge. Thanks for all of your hard work, Job!

Congrats to Dr. Camille Rubel who (in the words of Donna Blackmond) gave a “scary good” thesis defense to kickstart Halloween. Camille’s thesis research spanned electrochemistry to methods development and took her from San Diego, CA, to Lyon, France, and back. Congrats on a stellar body or work, Dr. Rubel!

As per annual tradition, the Engle lab gathered to show off our pumpkin carving skills, eat tasty food, and enjoy the fall weather in San Diego. We welcomed friends, family, and lab alumni from near and far for a fun afternoon of Halloween-themed festivities.

We joined forces with the lab of Prof. Michael Erb, star postdoc Dr. Jamie Schaum, and a team of chemical biologists in and outside of Scripps Research on a study detailing how to leverage high-throughput chemistry to convert existing ligands for proteins of interest into molecular glues. In this study, we were able to put our new pre-catalyst, Pd(COD)(DQ), to good use in a challenging C–N coupling reaction. Congrats to all of the co-authors on a great collaborative study!

For a link to the pre-print in BioRxiv, click here: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.09.30.615685v1

After completing his undergrad degree at Columbia University, San Diego native Evan Morgan joins as the Engle lab’s newest member. At Columbia, Evan gained a diverse set of research experiences in geochemistry and organic chemistry with Profs. Benjamin Bostick and Tom Rovis. In the Engle lab, Evan will pursue research in organometallic catalysis for a year before graduate school. Welcome Evan!

Together with the labs of Rodolphe Jazzar (UCSD/CNRS) and Pierre-Adrien Payard (Université Claude Bernard Lyon), this week we report a bench-stable CuH cluster inspired by Stryker’s reagent.

Multicenter-2-electron bonds play a pivotal role in templating cluster assembly during synthesis, allowing incorporation of the CAAC ligand. The pronounced stability of the cluster arises from attenuated hydride mobility, as probed by experiment and theory. This great team effort spanned three institutions and was led by Quentin (Lyon), Skyler Mendoza (Scripps Research), and Jesse Peltier (UCSD).

For a link to pre-print on ChemRxiv, click here: https://chemrxiv.org/engage/chemrxiv/article-details/66c3a7fd20ac769e5f193252

Huge congrats to Keary, who was recognized today as one of two recipients of the 2025 Arthur C. Cope Early Career Scholar Award. Keary will deliver an award address at the 2025 Arthur C. Cope Symposium at the ACS Fall National Meeting in Washington, DC, along with the other nine Arthur C. Cope Scholars spanning early-, mid-, and late-career categories.

For the announcement in C&E News, click here: https://cen.acs.org/acs-news/ACS-announces-2025-National-Award/102/i27

For more information about the Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award, click here: https://www.acs.org/funding/awards/arthur-cope-scholar-award.html

The final, peer-reviewed version of our study describing a new method to form cyclopropanes from unactivated olefins and 1,3-dicarbonyl compounds under Pd(II)/Pd(IV) catalysis is online this week in J. Am. Chem. Soc. Owing to its unique mechanism, the method gives an unusual stereochemical outcome in which the 1,3-dicarbonyl adds to opposite faces of the C–C π-bond. Congrats to the team of collaborators from Scripps Research, University of Pittsburgh, Purdue University, and Pfizer!

For a link to the paper in J. Am. Chem. Soc., click here: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/jacs.4c07039

As a reminder, an earlier version of this paper was published as a pre-print in ChemRxiv in February 2023: https://chemrxiv.org/engage/chemrxiv/article-details/641a9863dab08ad68f818947