Seven students and alumni from the laboratory of Assistant Professor of Chemistry Max Majireck presented their research in a poster session at the 250th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS). The research was conducted at Hamilton from August 2013 to July 2015. Held Aug. 16-20 in Boston, the theme of the meeting was “Innovation from Discovery to Application.”
John Bennett ’16 and Tina Choinski ’15 presented a poster titled “Intramolecular cyclizations of alcohols with rhodium(II) azavinyl carbenoids generated in situ from N-sulfonyl-1,2,3-triazole intermediates.” In this work, the Majireck group described ongoing efforts to develop a general methodology for synthesizing a class of metal-chelating compounds, which they hope to use in the future as probes to study various metal-dependent proteins, such as histone deacetylases, implicated in cancer and other diseases. Other co-authors of this presentation included Sky Aulita ’15, Yingbin Mei ’16 and Jon Shapiro ’17.
“Toward the development of a general transannular hydroamination strategy for the synthesis of pyrrolizidine and indolizidine alkaloids” was presented by Kathleen Allen ’15 and Esther Cleary ’15, along with Ben Schafer ’17, Ben Wesley ’16 and Chris Williams ’17. In this project, the team is developing a general approach for constructing collections of molecules with predicted neurological activity. Such activity is currently being evaluated in collaboration with Associate Professor of Biology Herm Lehman’s laboratory and will eventually be screened for activity at several non-profit biomedical research institutes. Additional co-authors in this poster were Alex Betrus ’18, Michael Dyer ’16, Alex Kaplan ’16, Katie Weinert-Stein ’14 and Chris Whiting ’14.
Majireck group members received external support from the Clare Boothe Luce Foundation and Sigma Xi Grants-in-Aid of Research. The Taylor Fund, the Priestley Fund and the Office of the Dean of Faculty provided additional support.
