The Department of Chemistry welcomes Dr. Yifan Wang to the faculty as an Assistant Professor in Bioinorganic Chemistry. Dr. Wang obtained her BSc from Zhejiang Sci-Tech University (China) in 2015, and she spent Fall 2014 at the University of Liverpool (UK) as a visiting student. She then came to the States and joined Prof. Aimin Liu’s research group as a PhD student. Starting at the Georgia State University in Fall 2015, Dr. Wang relocated to the University of Texas at San Antonio with the Liu Lab in 2016 and completed her PhD study there.

Christian Freeman, a Ph.D. candidate in Chemistry, is among seven University of Georgia doctoral students who were recently named 2021 ARCS Scholars by the Office of Research. Recipients of the faculty-nominated award, which is given to students pursuing degrees in science, engineering, and medical research who excel in science communication, will receive $8,000 each for the next three years to support their dissertation research.

Strain-promoted azide-alkyne cycloaddition (SPAAC) has emerged as a popular click chemistry technique¹. Over just the past few decades, a plethora of cycloalkyne SPAAC reagents have been developed for use as biorthogonal probes in cell and protein studies^2-4, peptide stapling reagents⁵, and crosslinkers in polymers⁶. Most of these cycloalkyne reagents suffer from issues that hinder their utility; these being low aqueous solubility and slow reaction rates.

This week, there will be three-minute thesis presentations from nine senior graduate students: Zhengwei Chao, Cynthia Tope, Rob Williams, Yongwook Kim, Tret Burdette, Lily Birx, Fangchao Jiang, Tanvir Ahmed, and Yiqing Zhang