The latest from our collaboration with the Ebbesen group on Vibrational Strong Coupling is published in Angewandte Chemie. We disclose an optical cavity that can fit in a standard NMR tube, allowing to directly observe the effects of VSC by NMR. The technique is showcased by using Schreiner’s molecular balance for London dispersion forces to probe how those forces change under VSC. Congrats to Bianca, Maciej and all the other authors!
Congrats to Emilie Werner on successfully defending her thesis! She is the thirteenth PhD student to graduate from the group. Special thanks to jury members Prof. Henning Jessen (Freiburg), Prof. Grégoire Danger (Marseille), and Dr. Claudia Bonfio (Strasbourg) for being part of the jury.
After 12 wonderful years in France, the group will move its main activities to the University of Ottawa, (Canada) where Joseph was recently named a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair. The group will maintain a small lab in Strasbourg until the end of Joseph’s ongoing ERC Consolidator Grant. See the press release here.
Maciej’s invited review on difunctionalization processes enabled by HFIP has appeared in ACS Org. Inorg. Chem. Au. Congrats!
Harpreet, Sophia, and Emilie’s paper on an H2-driven Ni-catalyzed reaction network that can make new ketoacids through reductive aldol chemistry and enable their reductive amination to amino acids in one pot without human intervention has been accepted for publication in Chem. Many thanks to our collaborators in Germany (Dr. Harun Tüysuz, Dr. Youngsong Dong and Prof. Bill Martin). Congrats to all!
Congrats to PhD student Maciej Piejko, who has won a short term fellowship to conduct research at Hokkaido University later this year!
Emilie’s side project on the incorporation of sulfoximines into the aza-Piancatelli reaction has been published in Organic Letters. Our summer student from Heidelberg, Milena Wiegand, contributed to the project during her stay. Congrats to all!
A warm welcome to Yannick Geiger, who joins us from the group of Prof. Sijbren Otto at the University of Groningen, where he worked at the interface of systems chemistry and chirality. In our Strasbourg lab, Yannick will work on exploiting aggregation in prebiotic chemistry. Welcome, Yannick!
Congratulations and farewell to DFG postdoctoral fellow Dr. Robert Mayer, who departs us to become an independent junior group leader at TU Munich. Robert published eight papers in the group, with two still under review. He recently received a Liebig fellowship from the Fonds der Chemischen Industrie (FCI). See photo below of our lab members sporting Mayer Lab T-shirts. Best of luck with the launch of the Mayer Lab and come visit often!
Joris and Robert’s paper on the mechanism of the nonenzymatic phosphorylation of pyruvate to phosphoenolpyruvate is published in Chemical Science. The results suggest that a single phosphorylation mechanism could have been sufficient to initiate a self-organized metabolic network. Congrats to all!
The Moran Research Group 