Chemistry Bumper Cars, 2014-2015

'Tis the season for chemistry faculty to pack up their U-Hauls, distribute plane tickets to the post-docs, and relocate their labs halfway across the country. 2014's shaping up to be not much different from previous cycles.

For this year's moves, I'm adopting the ChemBark format, picking up roughly where he left off.

**Know of someone missing? Let me know in the comments!

Moves

Sarbajit Banerjee (SUNY-Buffalo to Texas A+M)
Timothy Bertram (UCSD to Wisconsin)
Carolyn Bertozzi (Berkeley to Stanford)
Christopher Bielawski (UT-Austin to UNIST)
Erin Carlson (Indiana to Minnesota)
John Clayden (Manchester to Bristol)
Andrew Cleland (UCSB to Chicago)
Vicki Colvin (Rice to Brown, admin)
James Dalton (industry to Michigan, admin)
Scott Daly (G. Washington to Iowa)
Darren Derksen (SFX to Calgary)
Thomas Dunning (NIAC to Washington)
Katherine Faber (Northwestern to Caltech)
Eric Ferreira (Colo State to Georgia)
Joseph Francisco (Purdue to UNL, admin)
Giulia Galli (UC Davis to Chicago)
Justin Gallivan (Emory to DARPA)
Richard Gross (NYU Poly to Rensselaer)
Michael Gross (Bucknell to Wake Forest)
Mei Hong (Iowa State to MIT)
Jeffrey Hubbell (EPFL to Chicago)
Ramesh Jasti (BU to Oregon)
William Kittleman (Birmingham-Southern to Millersville)
Angela Koehler (Broad to MIT)  thanks, Anon!
Yamuna Krishnan (NCBS-Bangalore to Chicago)
Igor Larrosa (QM to Manchester)
Marcus Lay (UGA to Cooper Union)
Wenbin Lin (UNC to Chicago)
Mi Hee Lim (Michigan to UNIST)
Andrew Lyon (GA Inst. Tech to Chapman, admin)   thanks, Anon!
Lane Martin (UIUC to Berkeley)
Jim Mayer (Washington to Yale)
Phil Messersmith (Northwestern to Berkeley)
Gerald Meyer (Hopkins to UNC)   thanks, Anon!
Dan Mindiola (Indiana University to Penn)
Nouri Neamati (USC to Michigan, 2013)
Andrew Phillips (Yale to Broad)
Eran Rabani (Tel Aviv to Berkeley)  thanks, Max!
Gayan Rubasinghege (St. Cloud to New Mexico Tech)
Elizabeth Rhoades (Yale to Penn)
Tobias Ritter (Harvard to Max Planck, 2015)  thanks, Anon!
Jan-Uwe Rohde (Iowa to UNIST)   thanks, Anon!
Peter Rossky (UT-Austin to Rice, admin)   thanks, Anon!
Alan Saghatelian (Harvard to Salk)
Klaus Schmidt-Rohr (Iowa State to Brandeis)   thanks, MJ!
Gregory Scholes (Toronto to Princeton)
Dionicio Siegel (UT-Austin to UCSD Pharmacy)
Melody Swartz (EPFL to Chicago)
Paul Thompson (Scripps to UMass Medical)
Kallie Willets (UT-Austin to Temple)
Bryan Wong (Drexel to UC-Riverside)
Damian Young (Broad to Baylor)

Source: U-Haul.com

New Hires

Brett Fors (Cornell)
Neil Tomson (Penn)
Sophie Rousseaux (Toronto)
Tianning Diao (NYU)
Steve Townsend (Vanderbilt)
Jeffrey Rinehart (UCSD)
Jeff van Humbeck (MIT)
Alex Shalek (MIT)
Dave Martin (UC-Riverside)
De-en Jiang (UC-Riverside)
David Sarlah (Illinois)
Jessica Anna (Penn)
Sarah Slavoff (Yale)
Hailang Wang (Yale)
Ziad Ganim (Yale)
David Nagib (Ohio State)
Sergey Pronin (UC-Irvine)
Gerald Knizia (Penn State)
Jefferson Chan (Illinois)
Brett VanVeller (Iowa State)
Vincenzo Venditti (Iowa State)
Bryan Dickinson (Chicago)
Alexander Spokoyny (UCLA)
Matthew Cain (U. Hawaii)
Raymond Moellering (Chicago)
Nicole Becker (Iowa)
Heather Jaeger (Lehigh)
Tim Cook (U Buffalo)
Melanie Chiu (Stony Brook)
Christopher Johnson (Stony Brook)
Ignacio Franco (Rochester)
Nathan Jui (Emory)
Jacob Schwartz (Arizona)
Kateri DuBay (UVA)
Michelle Dolgos (Oregon State)
Dipankar Koley (Oregon State)
Sandra Loesgen (Oregon State)
Jesse Zalatan (Washington)
Cody Schlenker (Washington)
James Prell (Oregon)
Aaron Franklin (Duke)
Alex Grenning (Florida)    thanks, Rob!
Suri Vaikuntanathan (Chicago)   thanks, Andrew!
Sarah Wengryniuk (Temple)   thanks, Brando!
Graham Dobereiner (Temple)
Zac Hudson (UBC)   thanks, Anon!
Aaron Vannucci (South Carolina)    thanks, Anon!
Laina Geary (U. Nevada-Reno)  thanks, Anon!
Ryan Rafferty (Kansas State)     thanks, SupraChem!
Chen Zhou (Central Misssouri)    thanks, UCTDM!
Jonah Jurss (Ole Miss)
Brian Michel (U. Denver)
Michael Nippe (Texas A+M)
James Frederich (FSU)
Yan-Yan Hu (FSU)
Justin Kennemur (FSU)    thanks, Vastib!
Adam Duerfeldt (Oklahoma) thanks, Alex!
Gabriela Schlau-Cohen (MIT)
Stacy Smith (BYU)
David Michaelis (BYU)
Michael Ragusa (Dartmouth)
Derek Schipper (Waterloo)
Stephen Newman (Ottawa)
Jatinder Josan (VA Tech)
Avena Ross (Queens)
Nick Kuklinski (Furman)
Christina Vizcarra (Barnard)
Emily Derbyshire (Duke)
Anton Dubrovskiy [@SynthChem] (Houston Clear Lake)
Bill Morandi (Max Planck)
Feifei Li (New Mexico State)
Thomas Teets (U Houston)
Severin Schneebeli (Vermont)
Keith Reber (Towson)
Christine Caputo (New Hampshire)
Leila Deravi (New Hampshire)
Yftah Tal-Gan (Nevada-Reno)
Marco Caricato (Kansas)
Nozomi Ando (Princeton)
Elliott Hulley (Wyoming)
Andrew McNally (Colorado State)
Martin McCullagh (Colorado State)
Eilaf Ahmed (Emory)
Ronald Grimm (WPI)
Matthew Sheldon (Texas A+M)
Julio D'Arcy (Washington U - St. Louis)
Graham Griffin (DePaul)
Zhang Wang (Albany)
Luisa Whittaker-Brooks (Utah)
Michael Grunwald (Utah)
Douglas Genna (Youngstown St.)
Abhinav Nath (Washington)
Kevin Cash (Colorado Mines)
Rebecca Scheck (Tufts)
Robyn Biggs (Oklahoma)
Kenneth Graham (Kentucky)
Peter Kekenes-Huskey (Kentucky)
Anusree Mukherjee (Alabama-Huntsville)
Ku-Lung Hsu (Virginia)
Chad Risko (Kentucky)
Kara Stowers (BYU)
Ryan Baxter (UC Merced)
Ben Stokes (UC-Merced)
Carsten Milsmann (West Virginia)
Wei Xiong (UCSD)
Wei-Tsung Lee (Loyola Chicago)
Michal Szostak (Rutgers)
Mark Chen (Lehigh)
Lina Cui (New Mexico)
Joel Yuen-Zhou (UCSD)
Ampofo Darko (UT-Knoxville)
Sharani Roy (UT-Knoxville)
Anthony Appleton (Stetson)
Kyle Friend (Washington + Lee)
Eugene Pinkhassik (UConn)
Indrajeet Sharma (Oklahoma)
Scott Geyer (Wake Forest)

--
ChemBark's fantastic 2012-2013 roundup .
For earlier faculty moves, click here.

The 2011 Organometallics Roundtable – Peering into the Future

(Note: I’m publishing this post concurrently with my blog bud Chemjobber. Hop on over to his site to read about the industry / academia training and #chemjobs angles. This way, regular readers get twice the opinions for half the price!)

Who wants to chat?
Source: Texas A&M U.

As 2011 drew to a close, John Gladysz, the new Chief Editor of Organometallics, sat down for a chat with seventeen organometallic chemists from different national (German, Swiss, Australian, US, Chinese, British) and employment backgrounds (14 academia, 2 industrial, 1 government). The result?  An in-depth discussion, full of banter and back-talk, which covers topics such as industrial training for grad students, national creativity differences, “dream reactions,” and how to encourage industrial cross-collaboration.

As an icebreaker, Gladysz had each chemist dream up their “Christmas Stocking Reaction,” the ultimate goal each would love to see realized. Here’s a quick rundown:

-      Pragmatism –Joachim Ritter (DuPont) envisioned several scenarios for taking non-petroleum-derived feedstocks on to commodity chemicals. Ritter’s focus on hydroxymethyl-furfural (HMF, a darling of ChemEng labs across the country) was perhaps unsurprising, but I enjoyed his new ideas for deoxygenation of vegetable oils to produce fine chemicals. Jerzy Klosin (Dow) chimed in for development of newer, cheaper catalytic complexes, especially championing first-row analogues for replacement of palladium in polymerizations. Bernhard Rieger (Technische U. Munschen) weighed in on incorporation of CO₂ into polymers with nickel catalysts.

-     Break the Glove Boxes! – Jim Mayer (U. Washington) and Bill Jones (U. Rochester), building off of Ritter’s theoretical deoxygenation catalysts, proposed chemistry based on high-oxidation-state metals. Mark Humphrey (Australia National) wished for an air-insensitive route to Sonogoshira-type couplings of alkynyl dendrimers. Jennifer Schomaker (U. Wisc.-Madison) hoped to use nitrous oxide as a terminal oxidant, and Vy Dong (U. of Toronto) would like chiral ligands for high-valent Pd chemistry.

P-N-N pincers and Pd oxidation,
Z-metathesis and dehydrogenation,
Iridium cat'lysts that stitch up new rings
These are a few of their favorite things...

-      Crank up the Heat – Tobin Marks (Northwestern U.) wanted to see more ligand classes (think pincers and porphyrins) capable of supporting homogeneous catalysis at higher temperatures.

-      Mind your MOFs – Still others, such as Zach Ball (Rice U.) and Ekkehardt Hahn (Westfalische Wilhelms-Universitat Munster) weighed in on new types of building blocks and metals for cluster and MOF chemistry. Vivian Yam (U. of Hong Kong) wrapped up everyone’s requests with a nice bow; she hoped for new air- and moisture-insensitive OLED materials, solar energy-collecting polymers, and water-splitting photocatalysts.

Filling the “Tool Box” - Rieger cautioned to watch out for the recurring industrial opinion that “all the useful chemistry is already discovered.” Gladysz used the example of frustrated Lewis pairs, which, while a fairly young concept, are already turning heads. Bill Jones gave an impromptu one-liner about heterolytic hydrogenation: “If someone had written that on an exam…you’d give them a zero (back in the old days).” Humphrey chimed in on bimetallic bases, and Klosin for Ziegler-Natta studies.

But just then, Ritter poured cold water on the party: “Today’s chemical companies are busy reacting to rapid market swings and trends, which does not leave a lot of room for risky long-term projects.” Sensing, perhaps, that he’d deflated the roundtable’s enthusiasm, he quickly backtracked and mentioned that he’s “looking forward to…CO₂ utilization, solar energy, and biomass based energy and chemicals.”

So there you go, future faculty members, he’s written half your proposal already!

Throwaway lines – CJ has collected quite a few of these, but I’d like to comment on a few more.

 “I’ve talked to a colleague in China whose professor advised ‘If you don’t do palladium chemistry, how will people know you are my student?’.” –Vy Dong

Peering into the OM "xstal ball "
Source: Organometallics

This issue seems to rankle most with the faculty, who toe the fine line between capitalizing on their past successes and striking out with their own programs. Suzanne Blum (UC-Irvine) cautioned against what she calls “n+1 research,” clinging to well-trodden paths while writing funding proposals. But Yam and Humphrey pointed out that initial funding in their home countries (China, Australia) can be tough unless you stick to the script.

This creativity discussion wound through the group, until Yam and Hahn debated whether Indian and Chinese universities still seemed to hire based on quantity (i.e. papers published) vs. quality.

Hahn: “…even the 28-year old researchers from China know their h-indexes [and] introduce themselves saying their name and ‘I have an h-index of 10.’ And you wonder who has trained them?”

I can’t say that I’ve never encountered the "publish or die" sentiment, but I had hoped it was becoming less prevalent with time. Readers, your thoughts?

The Last Word - “…in my opinion, the chemical community performs poorly in transmitting to the general public what they are actually doing.” –Ekke relays a sobering thought for those of us in the blogosphere who toil daily to demystify our science.

Maybe he doesn’t read enough good science blogs?