The last two days were spent shuttling between organic and CHAL presentations. Hearing some lawyers (entrusted with protecting millions of research dollars) talk about rudimentary chemistry is an unbelievably painful experience. As a matter of necessity, I had to go to organic presentations to make sure I hadn’t lost my mind. In terms of the organic chemistry presentations, I didn’t see anything groundbreaking per se. Though, it was good to see that there’s some really interesting chemistry going on around the world. The ORG/MEDI poster session last night was particularly nice because it was a fairly reasonable mix of small molecule synthesis and methodology. I was most impressed with the work coming out of Matt Sigman’s lab at Utah. I admittedly never heard of him, though that’s probably understandable because U. of Utah is Peter Stang’s stomping ground. Anyhow, Sigman’s got a post doc working on copper-free Wacker oxidations, a methodology first discovered a few years ago (see: Org. Lett. 2006, 8, 4117-4120). Apart from using a DMA/water solvent system, the method looks pretty cool, and it could be interesting to see where Sigman takes the project in the future.
Additionally, I caught one of Sigman’s students give a talk on the development of an oxazoline catalyst used in hetero-Diels-Alder chemistry (ACIE 2007, 46, 4748-4750). Sigman (and his grad student, Jensen) altered the CF3 on the catalyst to a relatively less electron-withdrawing group then watched the change in rate and enantioselectivity. Sigman and Jensen ultimately concluded, “reaction rate and enantioselectivity can be directly correlated to catalyst acidity.” Pretty cool linear free energy relationship.
In summation, I think the meeting was a pretty good experience, subjectively. I got a ton of networking accomplished, developed several ideas I’m bringing with me back into the lab and may have found my PI a post doc for his lab (though, I’m still keeping an ear open).
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Have you never noticed that the Editor and a number of Associate Editors of JACS and JOC are here at poor little U of U. Here's a list of our who's who if you didn't google to see who might be at the ACS meeting
Anderson, Scott L. Keck, Gary E. Shumaker-Parry, Jennifer
Armentrout, Peter B. Looper, Ryan E. Sigman, Matthew S.
Bartl, Michael H. Louie, Janis Simons, Jack
Breckenridge, William H. Miller, Joel S. Stang, Peter J.
Burrows, Cynthia J. Molinero, Valeria Truong, Thanh N.
Conboy, John C. Morse, Michael D. Voth, Gregory A.
Ernst, Richard D. Porter, Marc D. White, Henry S.
Eyring, Edward M. Poulter, C. Dale Wight, Charles A.
Harris, Joel M. Ragsdale, Ronald O. Woycechowsky, Kenneth J.
Grant, David M. Rainier, Jon D. Zharov, Ilya
Grissom, Charles B. Richmond, Thomas G.
"Poor little"? Hardly!
I like Utah (both the state and University thereof). Is U of U begin becoming the Illinois of Mountain Time? Possibly, with a list of editors like the one above there's no telling how huge it'll be in ~10 years time.
Do the Utes take kindly to Pons and Fleischman (despite the experimental outcomes)?
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