Downey Group

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

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