Downey Group

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

Big news from the Downey Group – we’ve just been awarded a major grant from the American Chemical Society Petroleum Research Fund (ACS-PRF) for $70,000. These funds will be used to support our investigation of “Cycloadditions and Cyclizations for the

Time flies. Still, that 2020-2021 academic year seems like another world, with everyone in masks and cleaning stations set up in every classroom, students wiping strange antiseptic mixtures on their tables before and after classes, and big-screen monitors for connecting

Fun news from UR! This week I was named as the new Clarence E. Denoon, Jr. Chair in the Natural Sciences, an endowed professorship at the University of Richmond. No, that doesn’t mean I get to be the chairperson of

I’m ecstatic to report that our friend Yiqi Liu ’18 has successfully defended her Ph.D. thesis at Northwestern University! Yiqi has studied for the last several years under the tutelage of renowned professor Tobin Marks, a world leader in the

Friends, I write to share with you the excellent news that the Downey group has authored another publication. Please offer your best congratulations to Tyler Chong ’23, Alex Helbling ’23, and Remi Graff ’26 for the mountain of successful research

This is a proud moment. FIRST, congratulations to Elizabeth Heafner, Alethea Lin, Alexa Connors, Ivy Zhong, Joseph Coyle, and Yiqi Liu for the publication of long-ranging project, the one-pot enol silane formation-allylation of ketones with allyl propionates, in Synthesis! The

As we resumed normalcy this year at the University of Richmond, our seniors finally got a full year of (almost) regular college life, including a nice long graduation ceremony. You wouldn’t believe how long some people can stand up and

Greetings! I bring you the good news that our paper describing the synthesis of styrenes from two aldehyde starting materials has been published by The Journal of Organic Chemistry (Here’s a link). This work began with a chance observation that Grant