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).

New publication

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

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!