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Holland Lab
May 2012 - Bill McNamara's paper on hydrogen production with a variety of cobalt dithiolenes, part of our joint project with the Eisenberg group, has been accepted in a special issue of PNAS. This paper had significant contributions from undergraduate student Madeline Yin and graduate student Zhiji Han, and demonstrates our expanding mechanistic knowledge of this system. Congratulations!
March 2012 - Congratulations to Ryan Cowley (that's Dr. Ryan Cowley now) on winning a Young Investigator Award from the Division of Inorganic Chemistry of the ACS. (details)
February to June 2012 - Pat is learning about computational chemistry and about beer firsthand in Germany, during a four-month sabbatical stay at the Max-Planck-Institut für Bioanorganische Chemie in Mülheim an der Ruhr, Germany. Thanks go out to the Fulbright Foundation for funding, and to Pat's hosts Frank Neese and Eckhard Bill for hosting. Pat has the honor of giving a number of invited seminars while in Europe, while doing his best to clog up the Neese group's computer clusters with computations on complexes with big ligands.
February 2012 - Congratulations to Tom Dugan on receiving his Ph.D. degree! Tom is going to continue his outstanding work in organometallic chemistry through postdoctoral research with Alan Goldman at Rutgers.
January 2012 - Two more new papers were just accepted - congratulations! One will appear in a special issue of Organometallics on "Fluorine in Organometallic Chemistry." Our contribution by Tom Dugan and Jon Goldberg describes the mechanism of cobalt-mediated C-F activation reactions. Also, a paper on iron(I) hydride complexes was accepted at Angewandte Chemie; this is primarily the work of Karen Chiang, as well as our great collaborators in Mülheim and Northwestern.
December 2011 - Congratulations to Ryan Cowley and Karen Chiang, who defended their Ph.D. dissertations this month. Each of them is moving to California: Karen to San Diego to seek opportunities in science outreach, and Ryan for a postdoc at Stanford with Ed Solomon. Best wishes to both Karen and Ryan!
December 2011 - Welcome to four new group members! Graduate students Malik Al-Afyouni, Nick Arnet, and Megan Reesbeck have joined the Holland Group. In addition, Jared Kneebone has started a new joint project between the Holland and Neidig groups. We're excited to work with all of these enthusiastic new students.
December 2011 - Zhiji Han, a joint student with Rich Eisenberg's group, has had his work on photocatalytic H2 generation by nickel catalysts accepted as a "Hot Paper" in Angewandte Chemie. This paper has lots of great details about the mechanisms followed by the photosensitizer and by the catalyst, and points toward the use of oxidative quenching for long-lived photocatalysis. Congratulations Zhiji!
November 2011 - Meghan's paper describing the cleavage of N2 by an iron complex has appeared in Science. In this paper, we describe how several iron and potassium ions cooperate to perform the six-electron reduction of the N2 molecule. The product is a bis-nitride complex that reacts with H2 to give a significant yield of ammonia. (Coverage in Chemistry World) (Coverage in Chem. Eng. News)
September 2011 - More papers! Ryan's paper evaluating the redox description of a formally iron(I)-nitrile complex will be in a special issue of European Journal of Inorganic Chemistry. Also, Inorganic Chemistry will soon publish Zhiji's paper on the analysis of limitations of Co-dmg catalysts for light-induced H2 formation. Finally, a paper from Serena DeBeer's lab on a carbide complex (synthesized and analyzed by Ben Dible and Karen Chiang in our lab, and crystallographically defeated by Bill Brennessel) will also appear in Inorg. Chem.
September 2011 - Congratulations to Matt McLaughlin, our newest Ph.D. graduate! Matt will be going to UNC-Chapel Hill to do a postdoc with Mike Gagne.
September 2011 - Welcome to new postdoctoral researcher Katarzyna ("Kasia") Grubel, who recently completed her Ph.D. at Utah State University in Lisa Berreau's group. Kasia's expertise will be very valuable in our nitrogen reduction project, and we're looking forward to working with her.
September 2011 - Third-year undergraduate student Peter Thayer is joining us for independent research. We are well-acquainted with Peter's great work from his research in our lab in the summer of 2010, and are looking forward to his further efforts on ligand design.
August 2011 - More great papers on the way! In an upcoming paper in Organometallics, postdoc Ben Dible combined his interest in palladium catalysis with our expertise in bulky ligands and the result was a catalyst that is unusually fast for Suzuki-Miyaura coupling. In an upcoming paper in J. Am. Chem. Soc., Bill McNamara (a joint postdoc between the Holland and Eisenberg groups) found that a cobalt-dithiolene complex is incredibly active for proton reduction, using either electrochemical or photochemical sources of electrons.
July 2011 - Tom's paper on a "masked two-coordinate" cobalt(I) complex has been published as a Communication in J. Am. Chem. Soc.. In it, Tom also demonstrated ligand binding and C-F activation, and we anticipate that this compound will lead to many other neat results.
July 2011 - Welcome to incoming graduate student Malik Al-Afyouni, who recently graduated from Texas Tech University and will be working with us this summer.
June 2011 - Three short reviews by Pat have appeared recently: a "Highlight" in Angewandte Chemie, a "News and Views" in Nature Chemistry, and a chapter on synthetic models in the book series Methods in Molecular Biology. Note Pat's attempts to communicate in foreign languages such as German, British, and Biology.
June 2011 - Matt's paper "A stable molecular nickel catalyst for the homogeneous photogeneration of hydrogen from water" has been accepted at Chemical Communications. This is the first collaborative publication from the Holland and Eisenberg laboratories.
June 2011 - Welcome to the undergraduate coworkers who are doing research with us this summer! These are Sarah Kruidenier and Dylan Parsons from Monroe Community College, Monica Boshart from Whitman College, and Jonathan Goldberg and Madeline Yin from Rochester. We are also happy to be rejoined by Prof. Brian Edelbach, a UR alumnus who is a collaborator and organic chemist extraordinaire from Monroe Community College.
May 2011 - Pat has received a Fulbright Scholar Award to support his travel to Germany in spring 2012. Pat will be at the Max Planck Institute for Bioinorganic Chemistry in Mülheim, Germany, working with Frank Neese, the incoming Director of this Institute.
May 2011 - Ryan's paper "Selectivity and Mechanism of Hydrogen Atom Transfer by an Isolable Imidoiron(III) Complex" has been accepted at J. Am. Chem. Soc. This paper is the culmination of a long-term effort by the Holland and Cundari groups on the experimental and computational characterization of hydrogen-atom transfer.
Feb 2011 - Welcome to our newest graduate student, Chi Chen!
Dec 2010 - Welcome to first-year graduate student Wenwen Yao!
Dec 2010 - We're excited about the new webpage design (and the advent of this "news" page)! Many thanks to Danielle Chiz, a great undergraduate student at UR, for all of her design and organizational efforts that made it possible.
