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 us to off-campus students via zoom while we held class on campus. Students got sent off to quarantine for two weeks in tiny, individual cells. No one knew what anyone else really looked like.
Into that strange environment, that wasteland, came a group of fresh students, kids who had not gotten to experience a high-school graduation ceremony because of the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. Now their first year of college, what many of them had dreamed of for years, was like living on an alien planet with a toxic atmosphere. But they survived, and that group of seniors graduated last week having authored some of the strongest, most inspiring stories I’ve ever been a part of.
The Downey group was blessed with three individuals from this resilient crop of young people, and heartfelt congratulations go out to them all!
Alexa Connors, who somehow found time away from her varsity swimming schedule to perform research, completed a long-running project describing the allylation of ketones, a project first begun by Alethea Lin way back in 2016. Her paper appeared in a special edition of Synthesis, put together in tribute to my Ph.D. advisor, Davide A. Evans. Alexa moves on to a promising career in the medical device industry, beginning in sales.
Greg Hughes took an observation made by Downey Group alum Ramsey Goodner and spun it into its own project, the synthesis of 4-isoxazolines from chalcones and hydroxylamines. Greg has built this surprisingly complex project from the ground up and has it well on its way to an impactful publication, a task it will be up to the next student to complete. Greg is off to graduate school at my alma mater, UNC-Chapel Hill, in the fall of 2024.
And Helen Xia has been with me for four years. It’s almost impossible to imagine the group without Helen, who has emerged as a real leader as well as a brilliant scientist. Helen finished off the styrene synthesis project that Grant Dixon discovered by accident several years ago, and after its publication she took on a new project of her own, a Friedel–Crafts alkylation reaction of indoles. She initiated, optimized, and completed the project, then did the same thing for benzofuran nucleophiles. We anticipate another publication describing this work very soon, and in the meantime Helen will be beginning an M.D.-Ph.D. program at UT-Southwestern Medical Center, where she will furtherher training to become a world-class physician-scientist.
It’s been amazing working with this set of students, who have been instrumental in helping the Downey Group emerge from the shadow of the pandemic. The future is bright for them all.