2021 News

6 December 2021 – Welcome new first-year graduate students Davis Curry and Alex Ervin to the group!

6 December 2021 – Congratulations to our graduate student Julie Leseberg, who has been named the recipient of the Department of Chemistry's Chaffee Fellowship. This fellowship will support Julie's appointment as a GRA in Spring 2022, fueling her research and allowing her to accelerate work toward her degree completion. Congrats, Julie!

8 November 2021 – Congratulations to our graduate students Wade Henke, Julie Leseberg, Riddhi Golwankar, and Joe Karnes, who have all been named recipients of Graduate Scholarly Development Funds from the KU College of Liberal Arts & Sciences! The students will use these funds to support travel to the upcoming National Meeting of the American Chemical Society in Spring 2022. Congrats, team!

31 October 2021 – Claire Dopp is attending the COP26 meeting of U.N. Climate Talks! Claire was selected to be a member of the student-professional delegation of the American Chemical Society to the meeting. At the conference, Claire attended events and interviewed participants with the goal of disseminating her impressions of the event to other chemists and students across the country. She has blogged and posted about the meeting, and will also present her experiences at the ACS National Meeting in Spring 2022. Claire was sponsored for this opportunity by ACS, the KU Department of Chemistry, and the KU Center for Undergraduate Research. Congratulations, Claire, and well done!

30 August 2021 – James attends the "Innovative Separations R&D Needs for Advanced Fuel Cycles" workshop hosted by the DOE Office of Nuclear Energy. Thanks to Dr. Bruce Moyer and the other organizers for the opportunity to join the discussion and contribute ideas in this critical area!

16 August 2021 – Riddhi and James travel to the laboratory of Prof. Tori Forbes at the University of Iowa to begin new collaborative research on the properties of heterobimetallic uranium complexes. Thanks to Tori and her student Mikaela for hosting us as we kick off this new research endeavor!

12 August 2021 – Our undergraduates Jonah Stiel and Emma Cosner have been named to the inaugural class of Kansas ChemScholars. The Kansas ChemScholars program, just announced to begin in 2021, provides support for three exceptional undergraduate Chemistry majors each year who are Kansas natives in their final year at KU. Congratulations, Emma and Jonah!

26 July 2021 – Work has commenced in our expanded laboratory, which is located in the Integrated Science Building rooms 3105 and 3107. The new space provides a safe environment for assembling experimental apparatus and electrochemical investigations, among other tasks that are crucial for our work. Thanks to our Department Chair Prof. Bob Dunn for his support of our research and team!

8 July 2021 – Our research on the structural and redox properties of heterobimetallic zinc complexes has been featured on the Front Cover of ChemElectroChem. The work reveals that multiple redox-inactive metals can simultaneously influence the properties of compounds, including the promotion of ligand-centered reduction processes. Congrats, team!

15 June 2021 – Welcome incoming graduate student Davis Curry to the group! Davis is a brand-new G0 student, and earned his B.S. in Chemistry at Louisiana State University. He is working with Riddhi Golwankar this summer on measurements of Lewis acidity with phosphine oxide probes. Welcome, Davis!

24 May 2021 – We are happy to welcome Gabe Benitez to the group as a summer REU student! Gabe is a rising junior at Colorado Mesa University in Grand Junction, Colorado, and will be working this summer with Chelsea Comadoll as his co-mentor. Welcome, Gabe!

17 May 2021 – Congratulations to Emma Cosner, who has been selected as the inaugural recipient of the Jack & Carolyn Landgrebe Summer Undergraduate Research Scholarship at KU! This scholarship will support Emma for full-time research work in the group during summer 2021. Congratulations on this stellar news, Emma!

10 May 2021 – Emma Cosner and Claire Dopp have been named recipients of Undergraduate Research Awards for Summer 2021! These awards come with $1,000 scholarships to support Emma and Claire for the summer. Claire is studying vanadyl (VO2+) complexes as structural and redox models for the challenging uranyl (UO22+) ion, and Emma is busy preparing a new class of cyclopentadienyl-supported hydrides for studies of overpotential-optimized hydrogen evolution. Congrats to our outstanding undergraduates!

24 April 2021 – James has been named the recipient of the 2021 K. Barbara Schowen Undergraduate Research Mentor Award. Over the past 5+ years at KU, we've been lucky to have a tremendous group of researchers in the group--nine of whom nominated James for this mentoring award. Looking forward to more great research and working together in the future! 

21 April 2021 – Claire Dopp has been named a Beckman Scholar at KU! This program, funded by the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation, is providing support to Claire for two years of intensive undergraduate research in our group on the topic of heterobimetallic chemistry. Claire is currently working to prepare new vanadium complexes that model key structural and electrochemical features of uranium-containing compounds relevant to low-carbon nuclear energy, and is co-mentored by Shaun Kelsey (G2). Congratulations, Claire!

26 March 2021 – Congratulations to Jonah Stiel and Emma Cosner, who have been named Goldwater Scholars for 2021! The Goldwater is the premier national scholarship to support undergraduates in science and mathematics. Emma and Jonah are two of KU's three awardees for this year, and represent 1/3 (2 of 6) of the awardees for the State of Kansas. Bravo, Emma and Jonah!

16 March 2021 – Wade Henke (G4) has been selected to receive a Kansas Academy of Science Graduate Student Research Grant! His proposal, titled "Mapping the Mechanism of Hydrogen Evolution with Tunable Organometallic Rhodium Complexes," was selected for funding through competitive review among applications from many disciplines. The funds will support Wade's ongoing work in using stopped-flow UV-visible spectroscopy to understand the kinetics and mechanism of H2 evolution by [Cp*Rh] complexes that undergo uncommon ligand-protonation reactions. Congrats, Wade!

15 March 2021 – Congratulations to our undergraduates Jonah Stiel and Emma Cosner who have been named among KU's four annual nominees for the prestigious Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship, "regarded as the premier undergraduate award to encourage excellence in science, engineering and mathematics" in the United States. Congratulations on this honor, Emma and Jonah!

12 March 2021 – James presents an invited virtual colloquium talk in the Department of Chemistry at Pittsburg State University on our group's work with heterobimetallic uranium complexes. Thanks to Prof. Dilip Paul for the invitation, and all the faculty and students for the great discussions and friendly welcome!

10 March 2021 – Our undergraduate researcher Jonah Stiel has been awarded a RISE Fellowship by the Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (DAAD) for 2021! The RISE program provides support for early career researchers in science and engineering to carry out summer internships at selected institutions in Germany. Jonah has the opportunity to intern at the Karlsruher Institut für Technologie in Karlsruhe, Baden-Württemberg, and competed with 1,634 other applicants to be among 268 scholarship recipients. Congratulations, Jonah!

26 February 2021 – James presents an invited virtual departmental seminar at SUNY Binghamton on our group's work in unraveling the mechanism of H2 evolution by [Cp*Rh] complexes. Thanks to Prof. John Swierk for the invitation, and all the faculty and students at Binghamton for their warm welcome and hospitality. Great to connect and talk science!

16 January 2021 – Congratulations to Prof. Bob Crabtree on the occasion of his retirement from Yale University. Bob was James's PhD co-supervisor from 2007-2012, and is an invaluable mentor to this day. Today was Bob's online retirement symposium--it was a treat to see so many fellow Crabtree Group alumni online and hear stories from Yale days. Congrats again, Bob, and our deepest appreciation for all you have done!

1 January 2021 – Dr. Victor Day, our close collaborator since the start of our research group in 2016 and Director of the KU Small-Molecule X-ray Crystallography Laboratory, has retired from the University effective at the end of 2020. We congratulate Victor on this milestone, and look forward to continuing our productive collaboration in the months and years ahead!