Congrats to Vuk Vuković on successfully defending his thesis! He is the fourth PhD student to graduate from the group. After throwing a big party with friends from all over Europe, he will return to the lab for three months before heading off to his next adventure. Special thanks to jury members Prof. Vincent Gandon, Prof. Sébastien Thibaudeau and Dr. Joanna Wencel-Delord.
Vuk Vuković has won the EuCheMS poster prize at the 18th meeting of the French Chemical Society (SCF), held this week in Montpellier. His poster described the use of HFIP to enable dehydrative Friedel-Crafts reactions for a variety of alcohols. Way to go, Vuk!
Ed, Jing and Vuk’s paper in Chemical Science shows that hexafluoroisopropanol solvent enables simple monosubstituted cyclopropanes to undergo ring-opening hydroarylation – no donor-acceptor motif required. A good chunk of this work came from Jing’s M2 internship in our group. Special thanks to the Rowley group from Memorial University in Canada for the DFT calculations. Congrats to all!
Ed and Vuk’s paper on the accelerating effect of HFIP solvent on nucleophilic ring-opening of donor-acceptor cyclopropanes has been published in Organic Letters. Congrats!
Vuk, Ed and Eléna’s article on HFIP-assisted dehydrative Friedel-Crafts reactions of highly deactivated benzylic alcohols has been accepted for publication in Angewandte Chemie International Edition. It is Vuk’s first paper from his PhD and Eléna’s last. Congrats!
Sreejith Varma (financed by ERC) and Vuk Vukovic (financed by an MRT fellowship) join the group as PhD students. A warm welcome to both!
