News from Recent Group Members

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Lots of good news from recent group members.

Former PhD student Dr. Emilie Werner was awarded a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Postdoctoral Fellowship to work with Prof. Igor Larossa at the University of Manchester.

Former PhD student Dr. Cyprien Muller, now a postdoctoral fellow at ISTA with Prof. Rafal Klajn, was selected to attend the prestigious 75th Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting.

Former PhD student Dr. Maciej Piejko has received a Walter-Benjamin Postdoctoral Fellowship to work with Prof. Robert Mayer (also a group alumni) at TUM.

Former research associate (CR) Dr. David Leboeuf was promoted to Director of Research (DR) at the CNRS. He has led his own group at LIMA since 2024.

Keep up the great work, everyone!

Dr. Shunjiro Sodei

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Congrats to Shunjiro Sodei on successfully defending his thesis! He is the eighteenth PhD student to graduate from the group. Special thanks to jury members Prof. Grégoire Danger (Marseille), Prof. Klara Hlouchova (Charles University), and Dr. Wolfgang Nitschke (Marseille), and our jury president Prof. Sheref Mansy (Trento).

Sinan wins best poster prize at POMS 2025

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Congrats to Sinan Bascil for receiving the prize for best poster at the 53rd Physical Organic Mini-Symposium (POMS), an annual national conference for students, postdocs and faculty doing physical organic chemistry. Sinan’s poster featured his work on improving our ability to monitor vibrational strong coupling experiments by NMR.

New graduate students

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Three new MSc student have joined the group. New Brunswicker Marcus Vaillancourt joins us from Acadia University, Newfoundlander Rosemary Karn joins us from the University of Ottawa, and Ontarian Jack Cottingham joins us from Carleton University. All three received Merit scholarships. A warm welcome to all three!

Dr. Maciej Piejko

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Congrats to Maciej Piejko on successfully defending his thesis! He is the seventeenth PhD student to graduate from the group. Special thanks to jury members Prof. Peter Schreiner (Giessen), Dr. Ilaria Ciofini (ParisTech), and our jury president Prof. Jérôme Lacour (Geneva).

New publication

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The first paper from our collaboration with Thijs Stuyver’s group at Chimie ParisTech is published in Chemistry Europe. This computational work shows that electric field effects are likely responsible for the reported nonenzymatic reactions between ribose and phosphate or uracil within aqueous microdroplets. Interestingly, the electric fields also are found to have a large effect on the conformational preferences of small molecules, which will need to be taken into account in future calculations within electric fields. Congrats to Maciej and Javier!

New publication

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The fourth paper from our collaboration with William F. Martin’s group on a protometabolic nitrogen shuttle using pyridoxal has been accepted in the Journal of the Federation of European Biochemical Societies (FEBS Journal). Congrats to all!

Dr. Anas Abu Raed joins the lab

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A warm welcome to Anas Abu Raed, who joins us from the group of Prof. Anat Milo at Ben-Gurion University, where he worked on multicomponent reactions and asymmetric catalysis. Anas is partially funded by an Israeli postdoctoral fellowship and will work on nonenzymatic versions of metabolic pathways. Welcome, Anas!