News from the Tykwinski Group:

2009

May 21. Big news - The Tykwinski group hits the road. As many already know, beginning in July, the Tykwinski group will set up it new shop at the Institute of Organic Chemistry, at the University of Erlangen - Nuremberg in Germany.  While it’s tough to leave the U of A, it will be an exciting transition and a chance to continue the legacy of studying conjugated, carbon-rich established by my predecessors, Paul von Ragué Scheyer and John Gladysz.  Stay tuned for updates, and a new look to the website!

May 1. Congratulations to Dan, who adds the Andrew Stewart Prize to his list of accolades!

April 6. So the big day finally arrived, Alex John Tykwinski was born Monday April 6th at about 10 am - he weighed in at a whopping 9 lb 12 oz! Everyone is doing great!

April 6. Way to go Yanqing! I what was reputedly smooth going, Yanqing defended her MSc degree today. Good luck in the real world at Gilead!

April 2. A huge congratulations to Wes, who deservedly earned an NSERC Post-doctoral fellowship this year! Goin' to California????

March 27. Congratulations to Dan, who is the winner of the Departments Boehringer Ingelheim Research Prize for his outstanding work with the synthesis of functionalized pentacenes! Way to go Dan!

March 27. Hey, our chemistry appears on the Organic Chemistry Portal, take a look!

March 9. Congratulations to Erin, who was selected as one of this year's Chemistry UTS Award winners - NICE JOB!

February 9. Congratulations to Erin who presented her 502 seminar today on "Mistaken Identity: The Structural Revision of Natural Products Hassananes, Samoquasine A and Spiroleucettadine with the Aid of DFT Calculations." By all accounts, it was a smashing success - way to go Erin.

February 6. Incredible! After almost a year and a half battle, the world finally gets to see Wes' results on the prospect of a bent polyyne structure in solution; work that was done through a wonderful collaboration with the Zerbi Group in Milano. Check it out in JACS!!!!

January 7. Wow, after years of waiting, Paul's paper on the mechanistic aspects of alkyne migration in our FBW rearrangements finally comes out in Organic Letters. Thanks for being patient Paul, and congrats!

January 5. I finally made a gallery of Annie's cover art, check out!

2008

December 6. Wes' account on polyyne synthesis is now online in Compte Rendus Chimie (as part of the special issue on Recent Advances in Acetylene Chemistry) . Go take a look! Check out too the great cover art from Annie!

November 29. Congratulations of former group member Erin Elliott (E2), who got married this weekend. If you hurry, you can check out some really awesome pics from the event at her photographer's blog site. All our best wishes to Erin and John!

November 25. Chiral acetylides made to order via ligand exchange : find the whole story in Organometallics where Amber's paper just appeared. Nice work Amber, and we hope you're enjoying it back home in BC!

November 13. Forming polyynes just got easier using a Butadiynyl Synthon, Khalid and Eike's paper in ChemComm is out and looking good! Check out the nice work here.

November 1. Way to go BJ - cumes are a thing of the past; no more wasted Saturday mornings!!!

November 1. Dan's roll continues. The full paper account of synthesis of oligo- and polymeric pentacenes appears in the Tetrahedron Symposium in Print on Carbon-rich Nanomolecules. Check out too the great cover art from Annie!

October 29. Dan finally passes his candidacy, after months of waiting and longing to be back in the lab, Dan sails through the exam, and is now happily back at the bench making pentacenes! Congrats Dan!

September 30. Dan's on a roll, the second of his conjugated pentacene papers his the stands: Conjugated Pentacene Dimers is now online. Check out the photoconductive gain in Organic Letters!

September 10. Welcome to Marc-André Filion, who joins the group for the term as a Chem 299 student. Erin will be showing him the ins and outs of asymmetric catalysis!

September 3. Dan's Polarized Pentacenes are now online. Check out the structure-function anayses in Organic Letters!

August 1. Welcome back to Wes who spent the past month sufferning in Milano working with the Zerbi group on the Raman spectroscopy of strained cyclic tetaynes. Beautiful spectra and great espresso!

July 3. Welcome to Leah Miedema who joins the group as a summer WISEST student working with Shar on donor-acceptor radialenes. Leah joins us from Panoka, and becomes the second Tykwinski group member from this great city, following in the footsteps of Erin Chernick.

July 1. Welcome to Dr. Eike Jahnke and his family (Doreen and little Leni). Eike joins as a DAAD post-doc from the group of Holger Frauenrath at ETH Zürich, and will be working hard to form extended polyynes and stabilizing them via rotaxane formation. Welcome aboard Eike!

June 30. Just in time for summer, Adrian finishes up with cumes – great work Adrian!

June 3. Congrats to Wes for an Honorable Mention Award for his talk at the CSC Meeting here last week - Way to go Wes!

March 31. A warm welcome to Logan Matthew Lewis who arrived today to proud parents Chad and Jenny. This will undoubtedly be Chad's best experiment to date - we wish you all the best!!

May 22. Congratulations to Dr. Erin Elliot, who defended her PhD today in Urbana! Erin will be staying to teach at UIUC for the upcoming year - good luck Erin!!!

May 6th. Jamie's pentafluorophenyl polyynes are now online. Check out the beautiful crystal structures in Organic Letters!

May 1st. As always, summer brings undergraduates into the lab, and this summer we welcome Tiara Malina into the group! Tiara was awarded an NSERC USRA for the summer and will spend her time working with Erin on the synthesis of chiral alkynols - good luck Tiara!

March 20. Wow, it’s been a good week for the Tykwinski group!!!
•• Monday, Erin passes her cumes, which comes as quite a relief, since there was a trip to Cuba on the line!

•• Tuesday, Wes learns that his travel grant is funded to visit Milano this summer to work with the Zerbi group on bent polyynes – arrivederci Wes!

•• Wednesday, Adrian gets word that he is now and Alberta Ingenuity Fellow – excellent, excellent, excellent!

•• Thursday, Dan wins the Ralph Steinhauer Award of Distinction! Congratulations Dan!!

February 29. Leap year special news, a big congratulations to former undergraduate Erin Elliott and her new fiancé John – good luck!!!

February 11. Congrats to Dan for passing his 502 talk on stereoelectronic effects.

February 7. Mojtaba is home-free now (well, sort of...). He passed his candidacy in a little less than 3 hours, and now it's on to the PhD - great work Moj!

February. Andreea's paper is now in print. If you want to read about all there is to know about strained tetraynes, check it out in Organic Letters!

February. Congrats to Dan on receiving an American Association For The Advancement of Science (AAAS) / Science Program Award for Excellence!

January 7: The boss' latest book Modern Supramolecular Chemistry: Strategies for Macrocycle Synthesis heads to print, look for on the bookshelves later this year! (and make sure to check out the amazing cover, based an original drawing by Annie!)

January 01: The chemistry world welcomes Professor Sara Eisler to its ranks!!!!! Sara will take up her position as Assistant professor of Chemistry at the University of New Brunswick in July – Congrats Sara!

2007

December 10: Thanh, Yasuhiro and Nina's latest paper on the in situ formation of polyynes is now in print in JOC, very nice work guys!

November 03: Congrats to former group member Aaron Slepkov and his family, who welcomed daughter, Sophia (Sophie) Nicole to the family. Reports are that all are doing fine!

November 15: Radialenes are all the rage! Mojtaba's radialenes finally hit the press in Angew Chem - check it out here!

October 1: Check out Dan's first pentacene paper in Organic Letters here, describing the first ever oligomers with pentacene as a repeat unit. Nice job Dan!

September 25: Dr. Thanh Luu - has a nice ring to it, doesn't it?! Congratulations Thanh! You've come a long ways over the past 5 years, and learned a lot. Now it's time to relax a little and enjoy your accomplishments… Until you start work on Monday as Dr. Bundle's newest Post-doc. All the best of luck!

September 24: Wow, congratulation to Amber, who breezes through here MSc defense. Nice going Amber! Now she will join the NMR service at the U of A for the next year - we're hoping that our samples will always be first in line now!!

September 8: Welcome to Myron Wilde, who has joined on as a Chem 401 student for the term. Myron will be working with Mojtaba on the formation of hybrid radialenes. Good luck Myron!

September 1: Welcome to the two newest members to the Team - BJ decides to continue on with his graduate studies in the Tykwinski Group, while Adrian Murray joins on after finishing his work at StFX. Welcome!

August 24th: A big congratulations to former group member Erin Chernick, who today became Erin Chernick Menvielle! All the best of luck Erin and Gregory!

August 8th: The Boss heads off for a sabbatical in France. Let's hope that while the Boss is away, the mice don't play - too much….

June 1: Wow, Thanh not only wins second place for his polyyne talk at the CSC meeting, but he also gets a poster prize from the Bio and Med Chem Division for his poster on the converting his polyynes into triazenes! Very nice!

May 13: Congratulations to Wes and his Parkland Outlaws midget football team who won their division championship this weekend!

May 11: Congratulations to Mojtaba who successfully passed his 502 seminar on N-hetrocyclic carbene complexes of Late Transition Metals. He is now our resident expert on the Suzuki reaction!

May 1: Summer is here, and that brings summer undergraduates into the lab as researchers. Welcome to BJ Medos, who has been working for the past term on his Chem 401 project, and who will now continue his synthesis of adamantyne. Welcome also to Andrew Volk! Andrew has spent the last two terms in the group learning the ropes as Chem 299 student, and will now become and official group member as a summer NSERC USRA awardee working with Dan on the synthesis of azulene derivatives.

April 20: Wes passes his candidacy! Now it’s only research on the horizon – polyynes, polyynes, polyynes!!!!

April: Dan lands the biggest award that the U of A has to offer (at least as far as I know) to a graduate student, the Killam Fellowship. A first for the Tykwinski group -- Congratulations Dan!!

March: NSERC finally sees the light! Wes has earned a PGS-D fellowship! Just to make sure the rivalry is continued, they awarded Dan a PGS-D as well. What a great showing by Dan and Wes!

March 2: Shar officially passes her 502 seminar, and in an impressive fashion too– way to go Shar!

January: A good way to start out the New Year - Wes' paper Tris(biphenyl-4-yl)silyl-endcapped polyynes in Eur. J. Org. Chem. just came out!

2006
Dec 1: Congrats to former Tykwinski group undergrad Dr. Erin Chernick, who defended here PhD today from Northwestern University. Now she’s off to Houston, with a position at Rohm and Haas. Way to go Erin!!

Dec: Thanh's latest effort Regioselective trapping of terminal di-, tri-, and tetraynes with benzyl azide just appeared in Org. Lett. - Just don't call it Click Chemistry!!!!

Dec: Just in time for Christmas, Mojtaba's paper Oligomeric and polymeric systems with a cross-conjugated pi-framework in Chem. Rev. is out as part of ta special issue on Designing the Molecular World!

Nov 21: Congrats to Dr. Darren Bykowski, who defended his PhD today from the University of Maryland. Darren was the first every Tykwinski group member, way back in 1997 – sniff, sniff, they grow up so fast…. Darren’s now off to sunny Florida for a Post-doc with Bill Roush.

Nov: If you're interested in the stability of polyynes, check out Thanh's new paper Synthesis and stability of a homologous series of triynol natural products and their analogues in J. Org. Chem.

Nov 1: Welcome to the newest Tykwinski group member, Shar Ramsaywack! Shar started her PhD in the Fenniri group, but could resist the urge to make conjugated structures – so now she’ll be challenged with the synthesis of donor-acceptor substituted radialenes!

Sept 7: The newest Tykwinski group member, Erin Graham, arrives to start her grad studies at the U of A. Erin comes to us from Mount Allison, where she did undergraduate work with Prof. Andrew Grant. She was also an integral part in the huge success of the APICS conference that Mount Allison hosted in May 2006.

Sept 1: Welcome to Dr. Khalid Azyat, who joins the group as our newest post-doc. Khalid just finished his PhD in Strasbourg France with Prof. Arlette Solladie-Cavallo.

Sept: Dan snags the Margaret Thompson Memorial Prize awarded as the first year graduate student with the highest GPA; I wonder if he can use it to renew his subscribe to Rolling Stone???

Sept 1: Welcome to the newest Tykwinski group member, BJ Medos, who will be working for the year on the synthesis of adamantyne toward the formation of nanodiamonds. Good luck BJ!

Aug: Wes gets his first paper Polyyne synthesis using carbene/carbenoid rearrangements published in The Chemical Record, very nice!

Aug: Former Tykwinski group undergraduate Chad Lewis finally sees his efforts published, with his communication Chiral, cross-conjugated isopolydiacetylenes that just appeared in Chem. Commun.

April 5: Dan is awarded an Alberta Ingenuity Fellowship!! Congratulations Dan. In combination with his NSERC award, he now makes about the same amount as the boss!!!!

March 2006: Dan joins the ranks of the NSERC fellows with not only and NSERC graduate fellowship, but a prestigious CGS-M award – very nice!
September 1: Dan decides to join the Tykwinski group to do his PhD! He will continue the work he started over the summer working toward pentacene polymers, and then work with the Hegmann group characterizing their photoconductivity. Looks like 5 more years of blue columns!

Feb: Congrats to Yasu and Thanh, their combined efforts on A one-pot synthesis and functionalization of polyynes just appeared in Org. Lett.!

Jan: Over two years in the making, Annabelle's review on the Synthesis of naturally occurring polyynes finally sees its way to print in Angew. Chem.!