October 2010: Happy Birthday to Miguel A. Garcia-Garibay!

June 12, 2010: Greg Kuzmanich is one of a handful of graduate students selected to participate at the department's first Graduate Research Symposium organized by the Division of Organic Chemistry at the American Chemical Society. His talk is titled "Photonic Amplification by a Singlet-State Quantum Chain Reaction." Congratulations, Greg!

June 12, 2010: Congrats to Patrick Commins for being selected as a fellow of the 2010 class of the NSF-sponsored Material Creation Training Program (MCTP).

April 9, 2010: Dr. Brianda Barrios just joined our group as a postdoctoral fellow. Brianda received her B.S. with honors from UNAM in Mexico, and her Ph.D. from U.C.-Davis under the supervision of Dr. Claude F. Meares (editor in chief of the Bioconjugate Chemistry journal). Her work on photochemical rotors is being funded through the National Council on Science and Technology of Mexico (CONACYT). Welcome, Brianda!

April 7, 2010: The Department of Chemistry at Columbia University has recently announced the appointment of former Garcia-Garibay and Houk group member, Dr. Luis M. Campos, as one of two newly appointed assistant professors. In addition to doing great science at UCLA, Luis is one of the founders of the P&G Organization for Culture and Diversity. After completing his Ph.D. studies here, Luis joined the group of Prof. Craig Hawker at U.C.-Santa Barbara as a U.C. presidential postdoctoral fellow. He will start his independent academic career later this year. Congratulations, Luis!

Jan. 26, 2010: We are pleased to welcome new group members Amy Nielsen and Patrick Commins. Amy, a graduate of Iowa State University, is interested in synthetic methodology. She joins our group to explore solid-state synthetic strategies for green chemistry. Pat earned his B.S. and M.S. degrees from U.C. San Diego and spent one year in industry before coming to UCLA to apply his synthetic skills for the construction of molecular machines.

Jan. 11, 2010: Mike Lo filed his PhD thesis on Jan. 4. The title of his dissertation is "Preparation and Selective Derivatization of Azide-Terminated Self-Assembled Monolayers on Native Silicon." Mike is now considering job offers. Congratulations, Dr. Lo!

Oct. 9, 2009: Group students Jeff Buenaflor and Blanca Hernandez returned from their summer internships. Jeff, a UC LEADS fellow, spent his summer at UC Berkeley working in the lab of Prof. Richmond Sarpong with grad student Jenna Jeffrey. Jeff worked on an enediyne cyclization for the synthesis of dimeric resveratrol derivatives. Blanca worked with Jasmine Hunt and Katie Feldman in the group of Prof. Craig Hawker at UC Santa Barbara. She joined their group as a RISE fellow, making hydrogels with ABA acrylic acid-PEG triblocks copolymers (with anionic end blocks and a neutral, hydrophilic middle block) and cationic DMAEMA homopolymer. Welcome back, Jeff and Blanca!

June 10, 2009: Cortnie Vogelsberg and Greg Kuzmanich (pictured below) returned from their resepective three-month MCTP internships at the universities of Milano and Erlangen. Cortnie did research on structured silicates in the group of Prof. Piero Sozzani, while Greg worked in the group of Prof. Dirk Guldi doing various pump-probe experiments. Welcome back, guys!

Feb. 3, 2009: Research by recent grad student Hung Dang published in Organic and Biomolecular Chemistry shows that it is possible to generate polar oxonium ylide intermediates within neutral crystals. The scope of reactions in crystalline solids keeps increasing.

Feb. 22, 2008: Melissa Padilla receives the Award for Outstanding Presentation at the NSF-CAMP Symposium at UC Irvine. Congratulations, Melissa!

Feb. 21, 2008: Domino-like photodecarbonylation research published in JACS gets highlighted in Nature. Read the report by Leonard MacGillivray.

Feb. 16, 2008: Miguel Garcia-Garibay elected as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.