Group News

Sean wins poster award  

July 2017

Congratulations to Sean McWilliams on winning a poster award for his presentation on nitrogen fixation at the EuCheMS International Organometallic Conference in Amsterdam, Holland! (Everyone is familiar with the Holland group there.) Our resident Dutch postdoc Danny Broere was also chosen to give an oral presentation at the conference, and both Sean and Danny were excellent representatives of Yale. We note that any scientific discoveries about combustion chemistry in Amsterdam are not condoned by Yale.

Hydride-sulfide paper is published

July 2017

Nick’s full paper on his groundbreaking first sulfide-hydride complexes of iron has now come out in Inorganic Chemistry. It describes the synthesis of these complexes, and also detailed mechanistic studies into the C-S bond cleaving reaction that leads to these complexes. Congratulations to Nick, and thanks to Brandon, Sean and Dan for important contributions that made it into a great paper.

Sean is the Alpha and Omega

May 2017

Sean’s extensive computational paper that re-evaluates the correlation between DFT and experimental Mössbauer parameters (with coefficient α) has been accepted into ACS Omega. This paper is very important for our group, because the combination of computations and spectroscopy are essential for the thorough characterization of our compounds. Great work Sean!

Danny's paper in IC

March 2017

Danny’s paper on the THF content in the very useful starting material Fe(NTMS2)2 has appeared in the journal Inorganic Chemistry. Congratulations to Danny, and to Ilija and Anna who started us along this road of better characterization!

Sean to speak at GRS

March 2017

Congratulations to Sean on being chosen to be a speaker at the first Gordon Research Seminar on Inorganic Reaction Mechanisms. He will regale a select group of graduate students and postdocs with his ongoing work on N2 activation at the conference in Galveston, Texas. Quite an honor!!

DK on collaborative JACS paper

February 2017

Congratulations to DK, who did mechanistic work that was included in a gargantuan paper in J. Am. Chem. Soc. by Phil Baran’s group at the Scripps Research Institute. DK did excellent work that helped to elucidate the iron species present in an important catalytic reaction, and his studies have led to a more active catalyst. Great work by DK, and great work by Julian Lo and Phil Baran at Scripps.

Dan D: The Master of Angewandte

January 2017

Dan DeRosha has the 1-2 combination, having two papers accepted in Angewandte Chemie in rapid succession. One is a description of his work on an interesting cobalt-dioxygen complex that becomes activated by a second metal, for which he did extensive mechanistic studies that helped to understand the process. The other is the culmination of work started by postdocs Cory MacLeod and Richard Lewis, which showed the amazing bond-cleaving ability of low-coordinate iron toward C-H and C-N bonds in pyridines. A big congratulations to Dan and the other contributors to these papers!

New paper on diazoalkanes in IC

January 2017

Congratulations to the team of Kasia Grubel, Megan Reesbeck, and Daniel Kim, whose paper on diazoalkane-derived complexes of low-coordinate iron has now appeared in Inorganic Chemistry. They found several interesting complexes, and Daniel did some excellent calculations and wrapping-up work, which led to this very strong publication. Great job!

Paper on diazene cleavage in JACS

August 2016

We’re excited that an extensive mechanistic paper on the cleavage of N-N double bonds by iron-hydride complexes was accepted at J. Am. Chem. Soc. This paper was the culmination of a huge amount of work, including the initial discovery of the reaction by Guru Raj, the characterization of compounds, mechanistic work, and computations by Sarina Bellows, and detailed kinetic studies by Nick Arnet. Congratulations!

Paper on nitride C-H cleavage in JACS

August 2016

We’re excited that our report on the cleavage of C-H bonds and formation of N-H and N-C bonds from N2-derived nitrides will be appearing in J. Am. Chem. Soc. This was outstanding work by Cory MacLeod, assisted by Sean McWilliams in our lab, as well as Fabian Menges and Steph Craig from Mark Johnson’s lab. Of course, we couldn’t have done it without expert crystallography from Brandon Mercado. Great job, team!!

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