Chemistry Highlights
Dr. Alex McSkimming Receives Prestigious NSF CAREER Award
May 22, 2025
Professor Alex McSkimming received a prestigious Career Award from the National Science Foundation. This 5-year grant will support the McSkimming group for studying small molecules that are analogous to metal hydride intermediates that occur during biological nitrogen fixation. The group aims to better understand this important natural process and the chemistry of unusual metal hydrides more generally.
Dr. Guo Receives BOR Award to Study Electrochemical Reduction of CO2
May 22, 2025
Congratulations to Professor Wenxiao Guo who received a Research Competitiveness (RCS) Award from the Louisiana Board of Regens for studying electrochemical reduction of CO2. Her research group will explore how the structures of proton donors and molecular modifications of electrode surfaces influence the pathway of proton transfers, thus affecting the efficiency and selectivity of CO2 reduction.
Chemistry Professor Awarded NSF Grant for Collaboration with University of Southern MS
May 01, 2025
Professor Scott Grayson received a grant from the National Science Foundation. This project involves a 3-year collaboration with Professor Nazarenko at the University of Southern Mississippi. By varying the extent of branching (e.g. dendrimers, dendronized polymers, and hyperbranched polymers) the Tulane team will tune the dielectric properties of the materials they make. The group recently synthesized a dendritic material that has the highest dielectric constant among all known polymer films. These materials carry a strong potential for making high power batteries.
Dr. Busschaert Wins Award at ISMSC
May 20, 2024
Dr. Nathalie Busschaert received the Sessler award (Taylor and Francis) at the 18th International Symposium on Macrocyclic and Supramolecular Chemistry
Publications
April 13, 2022
CHEM 3215 Inorganic Lab students Bailey Mirmelli (left) and Sydney Koehne (right) are lead authors on a crystallography publication. Prof. Jim Donahue teaches the course where, instead of having the students write a final lab report, he showed them how they could take their structure and turn it into a short story for a crystallography journal.
The publication can be found here: https://iucrdata.iucr.org/x/issues/2022/02/00/gg4008/index.html
More from Prof. Donahue: "In my Fall 2021 teaching of CHEM 3215, an inorganic laboratory class typically only taken by chemistry majors, we conduct an experiment in which students make a coordination compound of nickel in which the metal ion is chelated by a redox-active ligand that supports reversible electron transfer reactions. The compound type is generally amenable to crystallization. We took the opportunity to prepare a variant of the compound that had never been crystallized, to devise conditions that yielded high-quality crystals, and to characterize the compound by X-ray crystallography. Rather than have the students write a final lab report, I instead showed them how we could take their new structure and turn it into a short story for a crystallography journal. The students were happy to not only get a glimpse of the publishing process but to be a part of it. This small story highlights the quality of some of Tulane's research infrastructure, which also can enhance the educational experiences we offer to undergraduates."
Our New PhDs!
August 3, 2020
Congratulations to Pravin Pathak, Shane McGlynn, Xiaoyang Cai, Karry LeBlanc, and Xiao Li who have all successfully defended their PhD dissertations this month! We are proud of all of you and can't wait to see what you do next. What a month!
Publications
June 18, 2020
Congratulations to Joseph Giesen and Prof. Scott Grayson on their recent publication in Tetrahedron Letters!
"Selective monobenzylation of 2,2-bis(hydroxymethyl)propionic acid (bis-MPA) to yield an AB linear monomer and analogous linear oligomers" Check it out here.
More Updates from Our Grads
June 15, 2020
Good luck to all of our graduates in their future endeavors. Here are a few more updates from our recent Chemistry/Biochemistry graduates!
Publications
June 11, 2020
Congratulations to Xiaoyang Cai, Rhea Kataria, and Prof. Bruce Gibb on their recent publication in the Journal of the American Chemical Society!
"Intrinsic and Extrinsic Control of the pKa of Thiol Guests inside Yoctoliter Containers" Check it out here.
Updates from Our Graduates
June 8, 2020
We love hearing the future plans of our Chemistry and BioChemistry graduates. Check out these updates from a few of our recent graduates. Stay tuned as we announce more updates from our grads!
Our New PhDs!
May 19, 2020
Congratulations to Wei Yao, Matthew Sullivan, Kelly Dougherty, Robert Mackin, and Megan Woods who recently defended their PhD dissertations this semester. Not to mention, they persevered through the challenge of defending virtually. Congratulations Wei, Matt, Kelly, Robert, and Megan on this great accomplishment!
Congrats to Prof. Jayawickramarajah
May 15, 2020
We are excited to announce that Prof. Jayawickramarajah has received an award from the NSF (CHE division, MSN Program) to design and study the dynamics and programmable nature of supramolecular DNA machines and circuits. Great work!
Congrats to Dr. Igor Rubtsov
May 11, 2020
Congratulations to Dr. Rubtsov who received new funding from NSF! Title: Colloborative Research: Infra-red Control of Electron Transfer Mechanisms (Award Amount: $285,000)
