Sinan wins best poster prize at POMS 2025

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

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

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).

Dr. Anas Abu Raed joins the lab

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!

Yannick leaves to start an independent academic career

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.

Dr. Valentyn Pozhydaiev

Congrats to Valentyn Pozhydaiev on successfully defending his thesis! He is the sixteenth PhD student to graduate from the group. Special thanks to jury members Prof. Olga Garcia Mancheño (Münster), Prof. Louis Fensterbank (Collège de France), and Dr. Anis Tlili (Lyon) for being part of the jury.