Another tough year, but it's still good to live in a beautiful place with nice people.  Photo credit: Adam



December 2021

Dave's book chapter on P-heterocycles (phosphiranes and more!) is out in Comprehensive Heterocyclic Chemistry IV.  It covers the literature through 2018 and was completed in 2019, finally published for 2022 (thanks, Elsevier). Here's the link.



November 2021

Lots of news from the fall quarter

• excited to welcome new graduate student Hannah Sexton, from Western Connecticut State University, where she worked with Dartmouth chemistry PhD alum Forest Robertson, from Jimmy Wu's group.



• congratulations to Ryan Tipker on acceptance of his first paper, in Angewandte Chemie!
Check out the accepted article here.
Thanks to all the very patient coauthors, including Balazs Varga for first observing this isomerization, Jake Muldoon and Dan Pham for confirming the structures of the syn and anti isomers (thanks Arnie Rheingold for crystallography), Ryan for determining the stereochemistry and more, and Russ Hughes for DFT to explain how it all worked.
 


This looks simple, but it's surprising on several levels.
§ tetrahedral carbon and main group analogs are configurationally stable, but this P-epimerization occurs under mild conditions
§ strain promotes P–C cleavage (A ---> B). Then

C-C rotation (route 1) is usually fast, and P inversion (route 2) is normally slow, so you would expect product C, not D.
But you get D (!) and we can explain why the usually labile C-stereocenter is not, and the usually stable P-stereocenter does inversion readily, thanks to the pendant carbocation.



• COVID-19 provided lots of time at home, so Dave wrote a few review articles

¶ Here's one in Dalton Trans., about metallacycle intermediates in the enzyme nitrile hydratase and related synthetic catalysts for nitrile hydration (Jorge's project).



¶ In Synthesis, read all about the synthesis of chiral secondary phosphine oxides (SPOs), including ones made by Amber and Jake.



June 2021
End of the academic year wrapup

• Congratulations to Sarah Chong '21 on her graduation, and good luck as a PhD student at NYU next year.  Here we are with Sarah's parents, all the way from California for commencement.  Congratulations also to our other undergrad research veteran Chris Connors '21, currently applying to medical school.



• Natalia Blank Ph.D. 2005 keeps moving up the academic ladder.  She is moving from Norwich U in Vermont to D'Youville U in Buffalo as VP for Academic Affairs.  Check out the press release here.



• Our own Sarah Gibbons Ph.D. 2019 is following in Natalia's footsteps at Norwich, recently moving up from her lecturer position to become a tenure-track assistant professor.



• Jake Muldoon Ph.D. 2018 made the big move from California to Florida.  Check out his new podcast "Medicine - beyond the science" here.

• Back in Hanover, Sarah Chachula and Ryan Tipker successfully completed their research proposals, and will be able to continue research now that most of the pandemic restrictions are gone.
• Dave survived teaching 3 different classes online during COVID.

May 2021
Pandemic progress: the group is all vaccinated now!
And more -- our Synlett review from October 2020 (see below) has now appeared in print.

October 2020, again
Our 4th paper in 2020, but they're all still "in press," with no page numbers yet.  This latest one in Organometallics is Sarah's first paper (!), finishing off a project started by Perry on Rh-benzyl complexes.  Big thanks to Russ, as usual, for his help explaining the dynamic processes and with DFT calculations.



The pandemic makes this scene unthinkable now, but here we are after Sarah Gibbons's thesis defense last year.




October 2020
Check out another review article (personal account) in Synlett here.  Dave's first Synlett account (2007) covered our development of metal-catalyzed asymmetric synthesis of P-stereogenic phosphines using Pd and Pt.  This new one is about "Beyond Precious Metals," including Cu, Ni, and no transition metals at all in our phosphirane and SPO syntheses.  Perhaps there can be a third one in 2033?



Bonus: the "crowd reviewers" called Figure 4 "suitable for a magazine, not a scientific journal."  Luckily, the editor overruled them.  Yes, that's Matt Cain Ph.D. 2011 with his journal cover.




September 2020
Welcome to new post-doc Jorge Garduño, from UNAM, Mexico City (Ph.D. with Juventino Garcia).



July 2020
Are we organic chemists yet?  Another paper in JOC, here.  Congratulations to Amber and the 9 other Dartmouth authors.  This one took 9 years, but the wait was worth it...now we can isolate P-stereogenic secondary phosphine oxides (SPOs) in a 1-pot process starting with the cheap chiral (+)-limonene oxide, isolated from orange peels on a giant scale.
This is our second paper for the special issue on "The New Golden Age of Organophosphorus Chemistry," following Dave's Perspective article here (also listed below in June 2020).



June 2020

"The Dartmouth chemistry department welcomes students, faculty, and staff of all backgrounds.  In our community, every individual, regardless of gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, socio-economic status, disability, nationality, political or religious views, or position within the institution, is respected and valued. To increase diversity in our faculty and staff, we recruit, retain, and support people from underrepresented groups, and we encourage an environment of collaboration, open communication, and trust, which welcomes diversity and respects differences of opinions."

• Congratulations to Amber, who made her project work, grew many crystals, completed her M.S. degree, and got hired at GSK just in time before COVID-19 shut everything down.  Good luck back home near Philly, Amber!

  

• The Corona virus shut down the whole spring term, but Dave was able to teach 113 Chem 6 students remotely.  Here's the teaching-at-home command central.



• Did you know that now is "The New Golden Age of Organophosphorus Chemistry?" That's a (virtual) special issue of The Journal of Organic Chemistry, which includes Dave's recent Perspective article on Metal–Catalyzed P–C Bond Formation via P–H Oxidative Addition: Fundamentals and Recent Advances.
Check it out here, and see the sample graphic:

 

• Congratulations to Sarah and Ryan, who passed their 2nd-year qualifying exams.

• Impressed by Lauren Mendelsohn '19, who published an Angew. Chem. paper already in her first year as a Ph.D. student at Princeton.



• Jake Muldoon had to deal with earthquakes shutting down his lab in the Mojave Desert, but he added a second daughter to his family.



• Ryan got a dog, Mary.

December 2019
Year-end roundup: feeling lucky to live in a beautiful place with nice people.



Lake Champlain selfie, featuring Sarah, Amber, and Ryan, on an August road trip to Burlington.



At the Organometallics Gordon Conference in July, Bergman alumni showed off their spelling skills, then posed for a more conventional picture, albeit with eerie lighting.  How many can you identify?

 

Barry Sharpless '63 visited in October for Dartmouth's 250th anniversary. Selfie time with Ryan and Amber!



Conservation of Sarahs? As Sarah Gibbons Ph.D. '19 (middle) moved on to her new job at Norwich U (see below), she was replaced by new undergrad researcher Sarah Chong '21 (left).  On the right, 2nd-year Ph.D. student Sarah Chachula provides some continuity.



Proud alumnae Sarah Gibbons Ph.D. '19 and Natalia Blank Ph.D. '05 at the Norwich University convocation in August.



• Column chromatography is more fun with ferrocene derivatives (photo credit: Amber).



• Former senior thesis student David Clemens-Sewall '14, now a Ph.D. student at Dartmouth's Thayer School of Engineering, will join an expedition on a boat to be deliberately lodged in Arctic ice.

“I spent four seasons in Antarctica and one in Alaska,” Clemens-Sewall said. “Compared to that, the fact we’ll have an icebreaker with a doctor on board and a power plant, this seems to me a very well supported project.”

• Ph.D. alum Samantha Reynolds '12 won the college-wide excellence in teaching prize at UNH-Manchester in 2017.



I missed it the first time, but better late than never, especially with comments like this:
"

August 2019

Congratulations to new undergraduate researcher Sarah Chong '21, who has received funding from UGAR to support her leave-term research in the fall.

Our paper on chiral copper secondary phosphine complexes is out in Inorganic Chemistry here.  Congratulations to Sarah and to very patient Chris Valleau '12, who started this project long ago, plus Jesse, Matt, Russ, and Arnie and Jim at UCSD for the crystal structures.



Welcome to new undergraduate researcher Chris Connors '21, here for the summer. 



June 2019

recipient who best exemplifies the qualities of a scholar."  She is Glueck group Ph.D. #17, putting women in the lead again: now 9 to 8.

Congratulations!

• Congratulations too to JJ Jo '17, who visited Hanover recently.  Next: medical school at Vanderbilt.




March 2019

• Spotted at the Orlando ACS meeting: Ph.D. alumni Tim Chapp '10 (Allegheny College), Matt Cain '11 (University of Hawaii), Jake Muldoon '18 (Naval Air Weapons Station), and former REU student Brian Mosby (Rollins College).  Can you tell which ones are Tim and Brian in summer 2008, vs today?


 

• Congratulations to Lauren and Amber, who received UGAR funding to support their senior honors thesis research.
• Dave's chapter on ³¹P NMR spectroscopy in Wiley's new Organophosphorus Chemistry book has been published.

December 2018

Official welcome to our two new graduate students, Sarah Chachula (from George Washington University) and Ryan Tipker (from Allegheny College).  Having two Sarahs has created a little confusion, but one will graduate soon.  Far right: view of Burke Chemistry Lab from Baker Tower.

     

• Congratulations to Amber, who will be the first-ever student in the department's new 4+1 AB-MS program.

• Congratulations to group alum Matt Cain, who received an NSF Career award for his main group chemistry research, teaching, mentoring, and outreach at the University of Hawaii, Manoa.

  

For OLD news (2014-2018), click here.

For OLD news (2008-2014), click here.

last update 3-10-2023