This is the time of year when we thank and congratulate Whited lab alumni! Congrats to Ben Brewster, who is graduating and will be starting in the Chemistry PhD program at University of Wisconsin in the fall! Also a slightly belated congrats to Irene Stoutland ’21, who is already at UW-Madison working in the Blackwell lab and was recently awarded an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship!
This one has been a long time coming, but it has been worth the wait! Check out this fantastic work in Organometallics by Jim Zhang ’18, Teddy Donnell ’17, Paul Peterson ’18, and Mike Trenerry ’18, as well as our awesome collaborators Prof. Buck Taylor (and student Vanessa Eng) and Prof. Daron Janzen. We provide experimental and computational evidence for silicon-assisted CO2 cleavage by an anomalous insertion mechanism, highlighting another mechanism by which silicon can play a key role in transforming CO2.
The Whited and Taylor labs explore how M–Si bonds can be tuned to direct CO2 insertion and enable C=O cleavage. Check the results here: https://t.co/TL2opVyVmh pic.twitter.com/9S79vlpIB9
— Organometallics (@Orgmet_ACS) November 12, 2019
Matt recently made seminar trips to Yale University, MIT, and Princeton University. What a great chance to share the cool chemistry being explored by Carleton undergrads! The trips provided a nice opportunity to chat with students and postdocs about careers at PUIs and to catch up with Carleton alumni Kaz Skubi ’11, Anna Brezny ’13, Mia Borden ’13, Joe Boerma ’13, and Paul Peterson ’18 (Paul was a great student host for Matt’s Princeton visit!). Thanks to Pat Holland, Alex Radosevich, and Paul Chirik for great visits!
We are nearing the end of the academic year, which means that it’s time for another round of seniors and alumni to decide on grad schools. Congrats to recent alumni Kate Demeulenaere ’17 and Aaron Reynolds ’17 on their enrollment in awesome PhD programs! This fall, Kate will be starting at Northwestern University and Aaron will begin graduate work at University of Minnesota.
Many thanks and congratulations are in order for Jim Zhang ’18, who just completed his time as a 5th-year research associate in the lab! Over the past year, Jim has elaborated some fascinating new bimetallic chemistry of Co(I) silylenes, addressed some mysteries in our Rh CO2 chemistry, and ironed out some loose ends with Ru silylenes (for those who are counting, that’s 3 papers to add to the 2 he already completed as an undergrad). After a well-deserved break this summer, Jim will be heading to Stanford University to pursue a PhD in Chemistry. As if that all were not enough, Jim finished off his time at Carleton by getting married (see picture below). Congratulations and best wishes to Jim and Lucy!
A belated congratulations to Whited group alumni and newly minted doctors Dan DeRosha ’13 and Alex Kosanovich ’14! Dan earned his PhD in Chemistry from Yale University for work done with Prof. Pat Holland; he just started a postdoctoral position at Columbia University with Prof. Jon Owen. Alex earned his PhD in Chemistry from Texas A&M University for work done in Prof. Oleg Ozerov‘s lab, and he will begin work at Dow in their polyurethanes division this summer. Way to go!
Alex (left) and Dan (third from left), back when they were younger men and members of the first cohort of Whited Group students, in front of the (now defunct) Mudd Hall of Science!
