Group News

new papers from Sean and Dan

December 2018

Congratulations to Sean McWilliams on his paper in Chemical Communications, which describes an interesting mixed-valence N2 complex of iron and its spectroscopy and magnetism. We also celebrated the appearance of a paper in Chemical Science describing the culmination of many years of work on CO2 activation by a low-coordinate cobalt system. This was started by Malik Al-Afyouni at Rochester, had a lot of computational input from Lisa Roy from the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Energy Conversion, and was brought to fruition by Dan DeRosha. Thanks to all!

N2 talk is online

October 2018

This past summer, Pat had the opportunity to give an overview of the group’s research on nitrogen activation at the 2018 Blavatnik Science Symposium. A recording of his talk is online at this web page.

Outstanding outreach

September 2018

Congratulations to our outreach team, which is led by Gannon Connor and includes grad students Daniel Kim and Allie Nagelski, and undergraduate students Megan Quimby, Sara Tridenti, Jack Atwater, Tori Hass-Mitchell, and Seungjung Sohn. They have done a lot of development and execution of activities involving gas chromatography for high-school students (at Common Ground High School and in the Pathways to Science programs), showing the students how chemists quantitatively analyze chemicals and sharing the fun of sustainable chemistry. During the Pathways Summer Scholars program, they got the highest rating of any activity, which is appropriate recognition for the careful and thoughtful development that they have accomplished collaboratively. Great job!!!

Farewell to Danny

August 2018

Danny Broere, a postdoc with us for two years, has departed for better things, including his wedding and his new position on the faculty at the University of Utrecht. Thanks for all of your hard work and great ideas, Danny, and we wish you continued success in chemistry and life!

Kaz wins NIH fellowship

August 2018

Congratulations to Kazimer Skubi, who is receiving a Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award Postdoctoral Fellowship from the National Institutes of Health. This is a result of his strong background, his exciting planned work on iron-N2 chemistry, and his very well-written proposal for the research strategy. Great work Kaz, and we look forward to big research success!

Sean's new paper in JACS

June 2018

Congratulations to Sean, whose paper on silylation of an iron(0)-dinitrogen complex has appeared in Journal of the American Chemical Society. This paper represents how Sean overcame a long-standing barrier in our group: finding single-iron complexes of N2 that are reactive. Great work, Sean!

Spectacular summer students

May 2018
We are very happy to have several summer guests in our lab doing research! Connor Halliday is a graduate student from Polly Arnold’s group at the University of Edinburgh, and is spending two months with us working on nitrogen functionalization. Josef Lawrence and Kuan Jiang are Yale undergraduates spending the summer advancing new coordination chemistry and organic chemistry in the group, and we look forward to their continued contributions in the coming academic year. Last but not least, Guy Pillon is a recent high-school graduate who is working on our alkene isomerization project for the summer, before matriculating at the University of Wisconsin in the fall. We’re very excited to have them all with us!

Danny's new papers

April 2018

Congratulations to Danny Broere, whose trifecta of excellent papers on iron-formazanate ligands will be coming out in Inorganic Chemistry, Angewandte Chemie, and Chemistry - A European Journal. Danny also wrote a Perspective on main-group complexes for N2 activation, which appeared in Science magazine. Danny will be starting a faculty position at the University of Utrecht this coming summer. Great job, Danny!

Welcome to new group members!

December 2017

Welcome to a number of chemists who have joined the research group this fall. Kaz Skubi has joined us as a postdoctoral fellow, and aims to synthesize and study new nitrogen-fixing molecules using molecular design skills gained during his Ph.D. with Tehshik Yoon at U. Wisconsin. In addition, we have had three new graduate students join the group. Allie Nagelski has joined our iron-sulfur cluster project, Jeremy Weber has joined our nitrogen activation project, and Conner Wilson has joined our organometallic catalysis project. We are looking forward to great research and camaraderie from these outstanding additions to our team!

Gannon's paper is out!

October 2017

Gannon, the first joint student in the Holland/Mayer labs, has had his first research paper published in Dalton Transactions. It describes protonation experiments with a series of Rh and Ir dinitrogen complexes from Alan Goldman’s lab. Congratulations Gannon, and we look forward to many more!

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