Cavagnero Group
Silvia Cavagnero is the recipient of the 2025 Emily M. Gray Award from the Biophysical Society. This honor recognizes Silvia for her development of undergraduate and graduate courses at the interface between chemistry and biology, innovation in instructional methods, mentoring students at all levels, and promoting diversity in biophysics. Cavagnero Group Ph.D. alumna Rachel Hutchison Dietrich has begun a faculty position at her Alma Mater, Roberts Wesleyan University in the Department of Chemistry. Rachel is teaching chemistry and biochemistry, focusing her research on discovering connections between chemistry and food science. Cavagnero Group graduate student Jinoh Jang was selected as an oral speaker at the 17th Midwest Protein Folding Meeting at Notre Dame University in April 2024. Undergraduate student Sofia Merrick received a 2024 Sophomore Research Fellowship to do research in the Cavagnero Group and undergraduate student Evan Schmidt has been awarded a 2024 National Science Foundation REU Research Fellowship.
Burstyn appointed to the NSF
Judith Burstyn will join the National Science Foundation (NSF) Division of Chemistry as its division director in January 2025. Judith was the Irving Shain Chair in Chemistry from 2017 to 2021. She is an accomplished researcher in biological inorganic chemistry. She has been recognized with several awards and fellowships, including selection as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and as an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellow. She has served in several roles in service to the chemistry community, including as a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of the American Chemical Society Journal of Inorganic Chemistry and as chair of the Gordon Research Conference on the Chemistry and Biology of Tetrapyrroles.
Outreach
High School Research Intern (HSRI) Program
The HSRI Program is an exciting opportunity for students who are rising seniors to conduct authentic scientific research alongside a mentor in research labs during the summer months. Interns work over 9 weeks during the summer, earning high school credit, college credit, and the Wisconsin Youth Leadership Certificate from the Dept of Public Instruction. Interns also participate in seminar sessions throughout their experience where they learn the skills necessary for research and build connections between this opportunity and their future goals. As part of their research experience during the summer, students participated in a poster session open to the public at the UW–Madison campus.
Outreach
ChemLEAP Teacher Professional Development
This past June, 20 high school teachers from across the country met with UW researchers to consider how to focus chemistry classes on making sense of intriguing, relatable phenomena. This community grapples with challenges and opportunities that emerge when students work to figure out phenomena they experience. Tools, practices, and resources were shared to address problems of practice and to inform the design of a shared system of curricular materials. This important work has been grant-funded for the past several years. As this grant ends in 2025, the outreach office will continue to seek federal grants and private donations to support this work.
Tenure news
The Physical Sciences Divisional Committee resoundingly approved tenure cases for Zach Wickens and Andrew Buller. In the summer of 2018, Zach Wickens joined the Department of Chemistry and his research interests focus on advancing new reaction design principles to alter the intrinsic reactivity patterns of small organic molecules. These interests lie at the interface of synthetic organic, organometallic, and supramolecular chemistry. Andrew Buller has been with the department since 2017. His research is focused on how to engineer new biocatalytic reactions and to do so in a broad substrate scope, a major challenge in enzymology.
Ediger Group
Mark Ediger retired this summer. He and his former students celebrated their years together with the Supercool Symposium at the beginning of March. Twenty-eight of Mark’s former Ph.D. students/postdocs were able to attend. The Symposium featured a day and a half of talks—some by former students/postdocs and some by Mark’s collaborators—along with a banquet. In June, Mark traveled to England to present the Kelly Lecture at the University of Cambridge, in the Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy. A highlight of this trip for Mark was giving the lecture at the Cavendish Laboratory and seeing their scientific equipment museum. This fall, Mark spent three weeks in Spain, visiting groups with expertise in vapor-deposited glasses.
Hamers Group
The Hamers Group studies surface chemistry with a focus on nanoparticle-environmental interactions, photoelectrochemistry of diamond, and the chemistry of lithium-ion battery electrolytes. Group members have recently discovered several findings in these areas. Connor Protter showed how copper sulfide nanoparticles selectively bind to thiol-containing molecules such as glutathione and cysteine through a novel surface disulfide linkage, providing insights into how intentional exposure of plants to copper-based nanoparticles influence plant health and ability to resist disease. Louis Morris and Cesar Ortiz identified the critical chemical pathway by which Silatronix organosilicon electrolytes inhibit the autocatalytic reactions that lead to lithium-ion battery failure. Anand Ode and Nate Rieders are studying the fundamental pathways by which diamond surface and nanoparticles emit electrons into water, producing solvated electrons and other high-energy reaction intermediates. Nate has implemented a highly sensitive transient absorption apparatus able to directly measure the spectrum of solvated electrons and other intermediates produced at surfaces.
The next year will be a year of big transitions. The NSF Center for Sustainable Nanotechnology that Bob leads will complete its 13-year funding run in August 2025. A symposium at the ACS Spring 2025 meeting in San Diego on “Nanomaterials and Sustainability: A Chemistry Perspective” will highlight some of the CSN’s successes. Bob’s last (70th) Ph.D. student will also graduate this year. After that Bob is looking forward to staying research-active by playing in the lab himself.
Hamers Group alumni are planning an all-group reunion in Madison the weekend of July 25-27, 2025. All former group members at any level, 1990-present, are welcome to participate. Anyone interested should contact Bob at rjhamers@wisc.edu to get on the event mailing list.
Boros Lab
The Boros research group is a multidisciplinary team of chemical biologists, imaging scientists, and medicinal inorganic chemists who apply coordination chemistry and an extensive toolkit of transition and rare-earth metals to develop molecular imaging probes and therapeutic agents for personalized medicine.
The Boros Lab has also focused its efforts on studying metallophores—natural products that play a crucial role in transporting essential trace metals in bacteria—with the aim of gaining deeper insights into the chemistry and biology of these ion carriers essential for bacterial survival. This research seeks to uncover ways in which these mechanisms can inspire and guide the development of new antibacterial drugs.
Since relocating to Madison in the summer of 2023, the Boros Lab has achieved significant milestones, establishing strong collaborative networks within the UW community. These connections have fostered highly productive collaborations, especially with research groups at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health (SMPH). In one of the lab’s latest collaborative publications, led by Wilson Lin (member of the Engle Lab, in the Department of Medical Physics) and Dariusz Śmiłowicz (Boros Lab member), the team explores azamacrocycle ligands as chelators for cobalt and examines how these ligands influence the oxidation state (Co2+/Co3+) of cobalt complexes. Through spectroscopic, electrochemical, and radiochemical methods, the study reveals structural features of azamacrocycles that allow for precise control over the radioactive cobalt’s redox behavior. These findings are crucial in guiding the selective synthesis of stable cobalt coordination complexes, particularly those incorporating the radioisotopes cobalt-55 and cobalt-58m, a promising pair for the development of dual-purpose diagnostic and therapeutic agents useful in nuclear medicine. Furthermore, this work provides the basis for redox-sensitive radiopharmaceuticals that can selectively deliver the isotope in especially reducing environments, such as hypoxic cancer tissues.
Weix Group
Research in Professor Daniel Weix’s group is focused on the development of new, catalytic methods for forming C-C and C-X bonds, with a particular emphasis on understanding mechanism and the use of first-row transition metals. The major focus of the group continues to be the selective cross-coupling of two electrophiles and the use of earth-abundant, first-row metals. Big advances in the past year were new ways to discover ligands, new mechanisms for accessing alkylnickel intermediates, new coupling partners, and advances in electrochemistry (in collaboration with the Stahl, Rafiee, and Paton Groups). To document the tremendous growth of cross-electrophile coupling over the past decade, Dan and his group have written an accepted review article for Chemical Reviews on the topic—it is 173 pages and has over 600 references. In the past year, a paper on the topic was published about every 48 hours.
Dan has been teaching Organometallic Chemistry of the Transition Elements and Structure Determination for the past few years and has learned so much while continuing to refine the excellent materials developed by his colleagues. Teaching these classes has had a big influence on his own research program, especially the new decarbonylative chemistry in the group.
This year included many comings and goings. Sileen Alomari graduated in May, her paper with Omar Beleh was published in August, and she is applying to medical training programs. At the same time, Isabella Priest, Benjamin Ahern, and Tianrui Wu passed their oral exams and were awarded master’s degrees. Alyssa Olszewski, Julianna Mouat, Alex Cruz, and Anthony Castro all passed their research proposal and advanced to Ph.D. candidacy. Michelle Akana (Ph.D. ’23) completed her Ph.D. work and moved to the Boston area with labmate/soulmate Brett Akana-Schneider (Ph.D. ’23). They are both pursuing postdoctoral training, Michelle at USARIEM (Buller) and Brett at Boston University (DeRosa). Nathan Loud (Ph.D. ’23) is now the director of the Univ. of Pennsylvania High Throughput Experimentation Center. Finally, Mareena Franke (Ph.D. ’24) departed for a process chemistry job with Gilead in Edmonton, Canada. Many new undergraduate students joined the group and departed over the summer and fall, including Zachary Farmer (UW–Madison), Cristian A. Morales-Borges (Univ. of Puerto Rico–Cayey), Ethan Duy Pham (UW–Madison), Jason Nguyen (UW–Madison), undergraduate student Gray Cicmanec (UW–Madison), Chuxiong Meng (UW–Madison), and Sarah Danielson (UW–Madison). The group also welcomed Ph.D. student Herman Recendiz to the group. Herman is from Dallas but did his undergraduate training at Lawrence University in Wisconsin.