December 2015 Congratulations to Miriam Bowring who has accepted a faculty position at Reed College! Miriam was an NSF-REU summer researcher with us in 2004.
August 2015 We wish Arjun Vijeta (IISER Pune), a summer undergraduate researcher funded by the BOSE program, farewell and safe travels.
July 2015 The National Organic Symposium, organized by MCK, is over! Thanks to everyone for their help. The next NOS will be at UC Davis in 2017.
June 2015 Congratulations to Alison Metz on completing her PhD and starting her job at NAVAIR. Best wishes to Erin Podlesny as she starts as an Assistant Professor at Stockton College of New Jersey!
April 2015 Osvaldo Gutierrez has been selected for the Rising Stars in Chemistry Symposium at the University of Chicago this summer. Congratulations Osvaldo! Congratulations to Osvaldo Gutierrez and John Tellis from the Molander group on our joint publication about the mechanism of Ni catalyzed cross-coupling reactions.
March 2015 Welcome to Prof. Haiying Wang from Jiangsu Normal University. Kudos to Osvaldo Gutierrez and the team at Dr. Reddy's Laboratories for publication of a stereochemical model involving C-F…H-C interaction.
January 2014 Congratulations to CSC Scholar Lei Liu on publication of his oxidative couplings of hydroxycarbazoles. We wish Lei the best on his return to China Agricultural University to finish his Ph.D.
December 2014 Welcome to Dr. Uday Neelam from Dr. Reddy's Laboratories in Hyderabad, who is working on joint projects.
November 2014 Marisa and Osvaldo have published a chapter in a new book "Understanding Organometallic Reaction Mechanisms and Catalysis" that highlights the latest insights and developments in the studies of important organometallic, homogeneous, and heterogeneous reaction mechanisms. Find out more about the book here!
October 2014 Congratulations to Ryan on publication of his awesome paper quantitating hydrogen-bonding catalysis!
September 2014 Congratulations to Kelsey for being featured in the University of Pennsylvania's SAS News page! Her work behind the Activities for Community Education in Science (ACES) program to introduce local students to the sciences with a hands-on approach is covered in the news item. Read the full story here. Well done to John Curto for a successful Ph.D. defense. John will begin a position at Pfizer in Groton shortly. Good luck John!
August 2014 Special congratulations to Alison, Erin, and Ariel on selection of our paper on chemically reversible mechanochromic sensor as a JACS spotlight! Welcome to Nossir and Kailash, who will be doing research in the group this fall. MCK is organizing the 2015 National Organic Symposium. Check out the awesome speaker line-up at: NOS 2015 Congratulations to Ryan Walvoord on completion of his Ph.D. Ryan heads off to U. C. Berkeley to do a postdoc with Chris Chang!
July 2014 Congratulations to Scott and Osvaldo on publication with the Bode group of a direct displacement mechanism for carbonyl substitution in the highly utilized active ester for peptide synthesis. Congratulations to Erin and Alison on publication in JACS of the chemically reversible mechanochromic bisphenazines.
June 2014 Congratulations to Rosaura Padilla-Salinas and Carilyn Torruellas on completion of their Ph.D. degrees! We send them off with good wishes for the future. Welcome to undergraduates Prosper Dzanwa (Moorehouse College), Kyle Niederer (College of Scranton), Harry Glicklich (Penn) and Luke Chen (Penn) to the group for the summer.
May 2014 Kudos to Young and crew on publication of the selective phenol cross-coupling in JACS.
January 2014 Welcome new graduate students Sergei Tcyrulnikov and Erin Nigro.
July 2013 MCK has been elected a Fellow of the American Chemical Society, see announcement.
June 2013 Welcome to Melinda Wang, John Todaro, and David Jungreis, Penn undergradautes, who will be working in the lab this summer. Kudos to Ro, Ryan, and Scott on publication of their massive review of Aerobic Copper-Catalyzed Chemistry in Chemical Reviews ! Welcome to Ariel Klinghoffer and Kaila Orlandini, two high school students working on projects in the group.
May 2013 Congratulations to the boss Prof. Kozlowski for becoming the newest Associate Editor for Journal of Organic Chemsitry (JOC) ! See official announcement at the JOC website! Congratulations to the Penn Merck HTE Lab expansion! See link for news article!
January 2013 Congratulations to Scott Allen on successfully defending his thesis. We wish him luck as he moves on as a postdoc with Albert Bowers at UNC, Chapel Hill. Due to a recently funded NIH instrumentation grant, the Penn-Merck High Throughput Experimentation Laboratory has undergone a significant expansion adding a UPLC-MS, a mass directed automated HPLC, and a Symyx Robot Platform. Thanks to everyone for their efforts in making these major additions come together.
December 2012 Many congratulations to Trung Cao and Erin Podlesny who successfully defended their PhD dissertations this month. We wish them the best as they go off to their postdocs with Jeff Bode at ETH Zürich and Tim Jamison at MIT, respectively.
November 2012 Congratulations to MCK for recognition as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
October 2012 Welcome to Osvaldo Gutierrez, a new postdoc joining us from Dean Tantillo's group at U.C. Davis.
September 2012 Congratulations to Phuong Huynh and Ryan Walvoord on the publication of the communication: 'Rapid Quantification of the Activating Effects of Hydrogen Bonding Catalysts with a Colorimetric Sensor', which was just accepted to JACS! Congratulations to Erin Podlesny on the publication of her article! Congratulations to former group member Dr. Michael Fennie who is starting an academic position at the University of Scranton after spending several successful years at Sanofi-Aventis. Prof. Kozlowski has been selected to receive the 2012 American Chemical Society Award. The award lecture will be Thursday, October 18 at the University of Pennsylvania.
August 2012 We are all excited for Ro, who will be getting married next weekend. We wish her many years of happiness! We bid summer students Kim Mullane and Sergei Tcyrulnikov farewell. Kim will be starting in the Ph.D. chemistry program at Penn and Sergei is headed back to St. Petersburg State University in Russia to complete his M.S. in chemistry. Good luck Kim and Sergei! Congratulations to Rosaura Padilla-Salinas, Erin Podlesny, John Curto, Ryan Walvoord, Carilyn Torruellas, Scott Allen, and Alison Metz, who all did a fantastic job with their talks and posters at the ACS National Meeting here in Philadelphia. Welcome to Brad Hutnick, a new postdoc joining us from Scott Nelson's group at the University of Pittsburgh. Congratulations to the former group members of the perylenequinone total synthesis team: Dr. Carol Mulrooney, Dr. Erin O'Brien and Dr. Barbara Morgan. Their recent review on natural products in Eur. J. Org. Chem. was one of the top ten most accessed articles from the journal in July 2012!
July 2012 Congratulations to Ryan Walvoord and Dr. Simon Berritt on the publication their coupling of aryl halides with nitromethane in Org. Lett. It is one of the "Top 10 Most Read Articles in July 2012" even though it only posted on July 27! There is a really fun post highlighting this work and nitromethane in James Bond movies at the Synthetic Remarks Blog. Congratulations to Scott Allen on publication of his article in JACS. Working together with out colleagues from ETH Zurich, Prof. Bode and Jess Mahatthananchai, he identifies the mechanism and key control elements in the N-heterocyclic carbene asymmetric hetero-Diels-Alder reaction, including a nifty CH-pi interaction between an alkene and an aryl group.
June 2012 Congratulations to Erin Podlensy on her J. Nat. Prod. paper on the total synthesis of a chiral binaphthalenetetrol. It has been selected as a Synfacts highlight, and has been stimulated quite a bit of interest on scientific blogs such as In the Pipeline.
February 2012 The Kozlowski group welcomes Dr. Avital Steinberg as our new computational postdoc!
January 2012 Welcome to Kelsey VanGelder, a first year chemistry PhD student who is joining the group.
October 2011 Congratulations to Erin Podlesny on completing the first total synthesis of (S)-5,5'-bisoranjidiol!
August 2011 Prof. Kozlowski has written an overview of the utility of copper in organic synthesis in the book Copper-Oxygen Chemistry.
March 2011 Congratulations to Trung Cao and his wife on the birth of their son, Kien, who was born on March 3, 2011!
January 2011 Welcome to Young Eun Lee, our newest graduate student, who officially joined the group this semester.
December 2010 The University of Pennsylvania, Merck, and NSF's GOALI Program are proud to present: the UPenn Merck Catalysis Center, one of three academic HTE (High Throughput Experimentation) facilities in the nation.
July 2010 Professor Kozlowski has been awarded the 2010 Philadelphia Organic Chemists Club award. The award symposium will be on October 28, 2010 and will feature talks from Scott Miller (Yale), Mary Mader (Lilly), Stephen Waters (Univ. of Vermont), and Marisa Kozlowski (Penn). See http://www.pocclub.org/ for more details.
June 2010 Congratulations to Trung Cao on the event of his marriage.
January 2010 Welcome to Alison Metz, Carilyn Torruellas, and Phuong Huynh, first year chemistry PhD students who are joining the group. Welcome to new postdoctoral fellow Simon Berritt who will begin work at Merck, Rahway on the GOALI collaboration in rapid reaction optimization.
December 2009 Kudos to the entire perylenequinone team on publication of five back-to-back papers in the Journal of Organic Chemistry. The cover page of the first issue of the Journal of Organic Chemistry in 2010 will illustrate our chemistry with a nifty picture of the helical chiral natural products and a background showing of cercosporin being produced by the natural mold. Paper1, Paper2, Paper3, Paper4
August 2009 We are very excited about funding of the NSF GOALI proposal in collaboration with Merck, Gary Molander, and Patrick Walsh focusing on rapid parallel screening for reaction development and optimization. This effort will include development of a the CReDO (Center for Reaction Development and Optimization) center at Penn with instrumentation for multi-well plate reactions and screening.
July 2009 Congratulations to Joshua Dickstein on completing his Ph.D. at Penn! He now moves on to Bridgestone America in Ohio. Much fun was had at the group picnic and reunion celebrating MCK's promotion to Full Professor including tasting of Joshua Dickstein's home-brewed beer. See pictures here.
July 2009 Congratualations to Barbara Morgan on completing her Ph.D. at Penn! She is looking forward to starting at the Broad Institute in Boston in August.
July 2009 Congratulations to Elizabeth Linton on completing her Ph.D. at Penn! She now moves on to teach at Mastery Charter School in Philadelphia.
March 2009 Synfacts has highlighted our Hypocrellin A synthesis. Congratulations to Erin O'Brien and Barbara Morgan.
January 2009 Our bisamidinium catalysts double hydrogen bonding catalysts have been published in Org. Lett. and highlighted in Synfacts. Kudos to Liz Linton and Raja Annamalai. Welcome to John Curto and Rosaura Padilla-Salinas, first year chemistry PhD students who are joining the group.
December 2008 Congratulations to Liz Linton on publication of her catalytic asymmetric Meerwein-Eschenmoser Claisen rearrangement in J. Am. Chem. Soc. which has also been highlighted in Synfacts
November 2008 Congratulations to Joshua Dickstein and Michael Fennie on publication of the three component alpha-iminoester couplings via an umpolung process in J. Am. Chem. Soc.
September 2008 After much work, "Fundamentals of Asymmetric Catalysis" has been published!! Thanks to all of those who helped this day arrive. Buy your copy while it's hot! See http://www.uscibooks.com/. Congratulations to Brian Hewgley on publication of his copper kinetics work, including the discovery of a small molecule catalyst that works like a self-processing enzyme, in JACS.
August 2008 Congratulations to Barbara Jane, Liz, Joshua, and Andrew on your presentations at the 236th ACS Meeting in Philadelphia.
July 2008 Our Hypocrellin A synthesis has been highlighted in the Chemistry World "Totally Synthetic" Blog!
May 2008 Congratulations to Barbara Jane Morgan on receipt of a SAS Dissertation Fellowship. Kudos to Erin O'Brien and Barbara Jane Morgan for the first total synthesis of Hypocrellin A which appears in Angewandte Chemie International Edition.
January 2008 Welcome to the group to Dr. Sangeeta Dey from the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, Ph.D. with David Berkowitz. Welcome to Scott Allen, Erin Podlesney, Ryan Walvoord, and Trung Cao, first year Chemistry PhD students who are joining the group.
August 2007 Congratulations to Erin O'Brien on completing her Ph.D. at Penn! She now moves on the Roche Palo Alto.
July 2007 Our aromatic decarboxylation communication in Organic Letters is one of the most accessed articles of the quarter. Congratulations Josh!