A warm welcome to Weiqiang Chen, who joins us from the group of Prof. Martin Oestreich at the TU Berlin, where he developed surrogates for gaseous or toxic reagents. In our group, Weiqiang will work on both prebiotic and synthetic chemistry. Welcome, Weiqiang!
Our paper on a large expansion of the Friedel-Crafts reaction has been accepted for publication in Chem. We describe Friedel-Crafts reactions with primary aliphatic alcohols and electronically deactivated epoxides, as well as sequential Friedel-Crafts reactions stemming from epoxide-opening, all without pre-activation. This was a massive project with over 170 examples, some of it reaching back nearly 4 years. Congrats to Shaofei, Marie, Florent, Vuk and Andrei and to our DFT collaborators in the Rowley lab (Carleton).
Robert, Harpreet and Sophia’s re-evaluation and mechanistic study of metal ion-catalyzed transamination under biological conditions has been accepted for publication in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. Congrats!
The eighth incoming class of PhD students joins the group. Valentyn, funded by the CSC Graduate School, will work on HFIP-enabled catalysis. Maciej, partially funded by the Région Grand-Est, will work on Vibrational Strong Coupling. A warm welcome to both!
Our article on expanding the Suzuki-Miyaura coupling to aryl sulfonyl fluorides has been accepted for publication in Angewandte Chemie International Edition. Special thanks to Maryam Bahadori and Chris Rowley (Carleton University) for the DFT calculations. Congrats to Paul and the rest of the team!
Abhijit thanks the EU for a H2020 Marie Skłodowska Curie Fellowship (project 792101)!
Congrats to Shaofei Zhang on successfully defending his thesis! He is the ninth PhD student to graduate from the group. Special thanks to jury members Prof. Abder Amgoune (Lyon), Prof. Tanja Gulder (Leipzig, via Zoom), and Dr. Morgan Donnard (Strasbourg) for being part of the jury, which was done partly in person and partly over Zoom. Best of luck in your return to China and in your next role!
Joseph has been selected as a Junior member of the 2021 class of the Institute Universitaire de France (IUF). Junior members must be university faculty of age 40 or less who are emerging leaders in research. They are awarded a substantial teaching reduction for five years and receive 15 k€/yr to support their research program. Only 70 junior members were selected in 2021 across all disciplines. An induction ceremony will take place at the National Academy of Science in Paris in November.
Congrats to Paul Chatelain on successfully defending his thesis! He is the eighth PhD student to graduate from the group. Special thanks to jury members Dr. Laurence Grimaud (ENS Paris), Dr. Manuel van Gemmeren (Münster) and Prof. Patrick Pale (Strasbourg) for being part of the jury, which was done partly in person and partly over Zoom. Best of luck in your next role as senior process engineer at ASM International in Helsinki!
Congratulations to Dr. Robert Mayer, who has obtained a postdoctoral fellowship from the DFG to work on mechanistic challenges in prebiotic chemistry. Well deserved!
The group has seen lots of change in the past months, with all postdocs who joined the group prior to September 2020 departing for jobs. Dr. Robin Isnard, our analytical chemist who was with us for six months, has taken a position at Eurofins in beautiful Aix-en-Provence, France. Dr. Ankita Malik, our sugar specialist, has taken a position at Tacalyx, an exciting startup in Berlin, Germany.
Andrei Golushko, an M2 student from the CSC graduate school, has finished his internship and has moved to the lab of Prof. Nicolas Giuseppone, also in Strasbourg. Corinna Heusel, our visiting Masters student from Münster, finished her internship and has returned to Münster to carry out her Masters project with Prof. Frank Glorius. Best of luck to all and good luck in the future. You will be missed!
On the incoming side, we welcome Edouard Voegtli, who joins us for his M2 internship. He joins our two other M2 students from the CSC Graduate School, Valentyn Pozhydaiev and Maciej Piejko. Finally, we welcome Wahnyalo Kazone, who joins us as a much needed analytical technician. Welcome all!
The Moran Research Group 