Group News

Pat receives Bessel Award

March 2016

Pat Holland has received a Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Award from the Humboldt Foundation in Germany, which is awarded on the basis of an outstanding research record. This award will support a six-month sabbatical visit to Regensburg, Germany during 2017, where he will interact closely with the research group of Prof. Manfred Scheer, an expert in the synthesis of cluster compounds. He also looks forward to taking in the local sights (and local beer) and catching up on literature reading, while keeping in close touch with the research group through videoconferences.

congrats to Sean on IC paper

March 2016

Congratulations to Sean on the publication of his paper on the variation of alkali metal cations in diiron N2 complexes! This paper in Inorg. Chem. is an important part of figuring out the way that different metals “team up” to weaken dinitrogen.

New Group Members

December 2015

We welcome new members of the Holland Group! We have been joined by first-year graduate students Dongyoung Kim and Daniel Kim, who will be pushing back the frontiers of chemistry through their Ph.D. work. In addition, junior undergraduate student Mackenzie Adelberg will be with us in spring 2016, joining David Minoli (senior) and Morgan Jackson (sophomore), who are already making important advances in their undergraduate research. We look forward to working with all of you!

Hydrosilylation paper in JACS

November 2015

Congratulations to Chi Chen, whose paper on hydrosilylation with a robust cobalt catalyst appeared as a Communication in J. Am. Chem. Soc. This really exciting system is the basis of our new NSF grant that will further develop inexpensive catalysts for important alkene transformations. Great job, Chi!

hydride-sulfide paper in JACS

November 2015

Congratulations to Nick Arnet (our group poster-boy), whose paper describing the first iron sulfide hydride complex just appeared as a Communication in J. Am. Chem. Soc, and was also highlighted in Nature Chemical Biology. This paper represents an important step in understanding the reactivity of hydrides in the FeMoco of nitrogenase, an iron sulfide cofactor. Keep up the great work, Nick!

N2 binding paper in Nature

October 2015

We are very excited about our paper on the first N2 complex of a sulfur-rich iron site, which appeared in the 1 October issue of Nature. This work is the result of a great idea by Ilija Coric, a postdoc who then brought it to fruition through a difficult series of low-temperature experiments. The new complex binds N2 by dissociating a Fe-S bond, which gives insight into the potential pathways of the nitrogenase enzyme.

New NSF grant

August 2015

We are excited about the start of our NSF-funded project in the Sustainable Chemistry program, “Catalytic Alkene Transformations Using High-Spin Cobalt Complexes.” In terms of research, this grant will support our further exploits in isomerization and hydrofunctionalization of alkenes. We are also very excited about the outreach component of the grant, which will involve the design of new laboratory experiments at Common Ground, sustainability-focused magnet high school in New Haven.

New cobalt paper in JACS

August 2015

We are excited about publication of an exciting low-coordinate cobalt-carbonyl complex, synthesized by Malik Al-Afyouni and Dan DeRosha in our group, and studied through spectroscopy and theory by the group of Frank Neese at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Energy Conversion in Germany. It gives insight into “sliding” motions of our supporting ligands, and also shows promise for magnetic molecules. Congratulations and thanks to the team!

Kudos to Chi Chen

August 2015

Congratulations to Chi Chen on the publication of his review article on steric and electronic effects in diketiminate-supported complexes. He was also recently chosen as the Yale representative to present research at an AbbVie symposium. Chi has also been very successful in new work on cobalt-catalyzed hydrosilylation, which was presented at the National ACS meeting in Boston, and hopefully will be published soon. Great work, Chi!

Happy arrivals and sad departures

July 2015

We are happy to host some great summer researchers: Viviana Marquez and David Minoli are Yale undergraduates who are taking part in research this summer with us, and we very much enjoy their contributions and energy.

We also bid farewell to some of the postdoctoral fellows in the group. Katarzyna (Kasia) Grubel has moved on to postdoctoral research at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Simon Bonyhady is moving on to postdoctoral research at UC Berkeley, and Richard Lewis is going to a position at the FDA in Washington, DC. We all wish them the best of fortune and continued great chemistry as their careers progress!

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