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.
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!
A warm welcome to Rim El Alaoui and Isaac Utovac, who join our lab for the summer. Rim is a second year student at uOttawa who won an NSERC USRA award. Isaac is a third year coop student at uOttawa. Welcome to both!
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).
Congrats to recent PhD graduate Valentyn Pozhydaiev, who has won the best PhD thesis prize from the Alsace chapter of the French Chemical Society (SCF) for his thesis entitled “New Reactions of Aminofunctionalization of Alkenes”.
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!
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!
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!
Congrats and farewell to postdoctoral fellow Yannick Geiger, who has started a tenure-track position (Chaire de Professeur Junior) to co-lead the Systems Chemistry Lab at our sister institute in Strasbourg (Chimie de la Matière Complexe). Yannick was only in our group for 11 months but quickly made an impact. We wish you all the best in your independent career!
Proud note: Yannick becomes the sixth PhD/postdoc from our lab to obtain an academic position since 2019, joining Sreejith, Robert, Marie, Abhijit, and Kamila. This doesn’t count research associates (David) or visiting PhD students (Martina) who have also gone on to lead their own academic labs.
Congrats to our former PhD student, Sreejith Varma, on being appointed as an Assistant Professor at IISER TVM, starting January 1, 2025. Check out his research page here.
The Moran Research Group 