Author: Wade Downey

We lost four Downey Group members to graduation this year, bidding them a teary-eyed farewell last Sunday. They are moving on to bigger and possibly better things! Best of luck to Sai Dulam (gap year and then med school), Remi

Great news for all you Downey Group fans out there: We have a new paper out in The Journal of Organic Chemistry. The reaction that Eric Zhou worked on for two and a half years, the silyloxyalkylation of 3-alkylated indoles,

Or is it D. Phil.?Congratulations to our own Claire Fuller, now Claire Fuller Reed, who successfully completed her doctoral studies at Cambridge in the UK! Claire is moving on to a postdoc working in the same field, which is such

Great news out of UNC-Chapel Hill. Downey Group Alum Sam Bottum (UR ’20) has successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis and can now be addressed as Doctor. Sam went from silyl triflate chemistry at UR to building really weird (but still

Incredible news from the Downey group – Both Anna Johnson ’27 and Eric Zhou ’27 have been selected for nationally competitive Goldwater Scholarships! Only 300 students across the nation can receive these awards, and two of them are right here

Hear ye, hear ye! We have JUST PUBLISHED a new paper in Tetrahedron Letters describing the alkylation of simple ketones with secondary acetates, a process promoted by–guess what?–TMSOTf! Karmen Smith ’25 discovered this reaction way back in the fall of

Yesterday we tearfully bid farewell to the Downey Group graduates of 2025, who will be moving on to extraordinary things. Joshua Pae, who actually graduated this past December, is eyeing medical school in the near future, as are S. Mark

Downey group alum Nick Yeutter ’15 is featured in this cool story describing his passions for medicine and music: The Nick Yeutter Pronounced “Yiter,” by the way.

The hard work of Helen Xia ’24, Eric Zhou ’27, and Bianca Bicalho ’22 recently paid off in a publication in Synthetic Communications describing the alkylation of indoles, benzofurans, furans, and thiophenes with alkyl acetates. This TMSOTf-promoted chemistry was discovered,

It is with great pleasure that I can announce Elizabeth Heafner, UR class of 2019, is now a fully fledged Ph.D.! Elizabeth completed her doctoral research at Berkeley under the mentorship of Dean Toste, Bob Bergman, and Ken Raymond. She