We welcome two new postdoctoral coworkers this month to the lab. Simon Suhr comes to us from Biprajit Sarkar’s group at U. Stuttgart, and has won a Feodor Lynen Fellowship from the Humboldt Foundation that will support his research on catalytic N₂ reduction and PCET. Samuel Newman-Stonebraker comes to us from Abby Doyle’s lab at UCLA, and will be working on bioinorganic model complexes. We are super excited about each of these accomplished, creative researchers who will be adding a lot to the group!

Congrats to Juan Serviano and Erik Phipps on their paper describing a method for adding OR and O₂CR groups to 2-azadienes, catalyzed by cobalt complexes. Juan did a lot of hard work to get this paper out, and both Juan and I are grateful to Erik for coming up with the original idea for this work and defining the scope. An awesome piece of teamwork!!

Our ten-year-long battle with a really weird iron-hydride complex has finally come to fruition, with a paper appearing in Chemical Science. In order to sort out its dynamic behavior, Sean McWilliams performed neutron crystallography, lots of variable-temperature Mössbauer, and other studies, while our collaborators Eckhard Bill and Shengfa Ye contributed magnetic and computational analysis, respectively. And a huge amount of the insight into the crystal twinning that underlies the behavior came from Brandon Mercado, who we are so lucky to have here at Yale as a crystallographic collaborator.

A key driver behind our ultimate understanding was Eckhard, who tragically passed away just after the paper was submitted in the fall. This paper is a testament to his deep insight and fearless inquisitive spirit. We are really proud of this paper, which was recognized as a “Pick of the Week” by Chem. Sci.

Congratulations to Alec Hegg, whose first paper from the group has now appeared in Faraday Discussions. It describes our first foray into molybdenum chemistry, and he developed a porphyrin-supported molybdenum nitride that is capable of catalytically reducing N₂ to ammonia. This is part of our ongoing collaboration with Alex Miller and Alan Goldman, where Alec is also playing an important leadership role on outreach (described at NitrogenFixers.org). Great stuff, Alec!