An Update at the End of an Eventful Semester

While I’ve frequently updated our group’s Twitter (which you should follow if you do not already @EllingLab), a New Year’s resolution of mine is to update the website more regularly. A lot of exciting things have been happening since we set up shop here at Wesleyan, and I wanted to highlight some of that here.

First, the lab space is fully renovated, so a huge thank you to Angela Wong for shepherding this process along! Additionally, our rheometer has been installed and is ready for action. We anticipate the light scattering system for the GPC should be up and running in late January/early February.

Kyle shows the NMR spectrum for our first new ROMP monomer candidate.

With the hardware all in place, we’ve been hard at work performing reactions. I want to first acknowledge Kyle, Maya, and Jeremy, the group’s first undergraduate researchers, who’ve made excellent progress so far. Kyle and Jeremy have been hard at work synthesizing brand new monomers for ROMP, and we’ve already started investigating their metathesis activity. Maya, meanwhile, has been working in collaboration with Professor Northrup on modeling some new reaction pathways. Hopefully she’ll be at the hood soon in the new year.

Additionally, wanted to thank both Gabe and Libby, two excellent new first year graduate students, who did one-month rotations with me this semester. Between the two of them, we’ve been able to figure out some new pathways forward on a few reactions.

Finally, I’m excited for two new undergraduates, Sarah and Graham, to join the team in January. We’ll have a full team ready to do some great research in 2022.

Happy holidays to everyone!