Cavagnero Group
Graduate student Anubhab Halder was selected to deliver an oral presentation at the Biophysical Society Meeting in Los Angeles (CA) in February 2025. In his talk, Anubhab described the development of LED-enhanced nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy on a benchtop NMR spectrometer, to elucidate biomolecular structure and dynamics in solution at low cost and ultra-high sensitivity.
Undergraduate student Hermione Liu was awarded the Wisconsin ACS Local Section Undergraduate Award for Excellence in Chemistry. Undergraduate students Akshata Moorthy and Sofia Merrick were awarded the Research Sophomore Award and the Hilldale Fellowship, respectively, to pursue investigations on protein folding at birth. Sam Carey was awarded the Robert Franklin Taylor Scholarship and the Mary Shine Peterson Undergraduate Research Award to pursue investigations to explore biomolecular structures with LEDs and magnets. Undergraduate student Emma Thomas was awarded the Richard Fischer Fellowship from the UW-Madison Department of Chemistry to carry out research on the kinetic trapping of proteins at birth.
Professor Silvia Cavagnero was awarded the 2025 Emily M. Gray Award of the Biophysical Society for her student mentoring, innovations in course development, and for broadening participation in her research on protein folding and dynamics in living cells. Silvia (with Alessandro Senes, Biochemistry) also received funding from the National Institutes of Health for a new T32 Training Grant in Molecular Biophysics (MBTP). This training program will fund 10-12 graduate students every year for 5 years to pursue cutting-edge quantitative bio‐related research across many UW-Madison departments, including chemistry.
Gellman Group
Research in the Gellman group continues to explore the functions of proteins and protein‐inspired molecules. Their approach emphasizes chemical synthesis and unorthodox design strategies to generate novel tools and surprising discoveries. Sam has been department chair for over a year, and, somehow, the group has not collapsed, which raises the possibility that his role might not be essential in terms of experimental progress. Testing of this hypothesis is underway.
There has been lots of turnover in the past year. Four graduate students recently completed their Ph.D. Rylie Morris has taken a post‐doctoral position at the University of Michigan, John Mannone is a post-doctoral scholar in Munich, Ruiwen (Irian) Xu has a post-doctoral position at Eli Lilly, and Philip Lampkin is teaching introductory organic chemistry (Chemistry 343) this fall; he will begin a post‐doctoral fellowship at the University of Utah in January. Dr. Ariel Kuhn completed an NIH post-doctoral fellowship in the group and took a position at Empirico, a biotech company in Madison. In the fall of 2024, two graduate students joined the group, Rui Wang and Charlie Roberts. Also joining last fall was a new post-doctoral scholar, Dr. Ash Sarkar. Post‐doctoral scholar Dr. Joe Swain joined us in May 2025.
Ediger Group
Professor Mark Ediger (emeritus) is collaborating with other groups to continue work on supercooled liquids and glasses. In the spring, he spent 3 months at Roskilde University in Denmark, and he will return to Roskilde in September to receive an Honorary Doctorate. Mark presented the Burstein Lecture at the University of Pennsylvania in January and the Chan Hong Ha Lectureship at Sungkyunkwan University in South Korea in March. This summer, the Journal of Physical Chemistry published a Festschrift special issue to celebrate his contributions to supercooled liquids and glasses.
Theoretical Cheistry Institute News
Dr. Frank Noé, Partner Research Manager at Microsoft Research AI for Science in Berlin, was awarded the 2025–2026 Joseph O. Hirschfelder Prize in Theoretical Chemistry. Dr. Noé visited the Department of Chemistry, presented talks on October 20 and 21, 2025, and was honored at an award banquet the night of October 21. Dr. Noé is a pioneer in integrating artificial intelligence with theoretical chemistry. He has developed deep learning approaches that address fundamental challenges in statistical mechanics: Boltzmann Generators, which introduced AI generative models into statistical mechanics to transform molecular sampling; VAMPnets, which provide a deep learning framework for constructing kinetic models of biomolecular dynamics; and the recent BioEmu-1 model, which enables the prediction of protein structural ensembles with unprecedented efficiency. In addition, his group has advanced quantum chemistry through the development of deep learning‐based quantum Monte Carlo methods that deliver accurate solutions to the electronic Schrödinger equation. Together, these landmark contributions have established artificial intelligence as a transformative frontier in theoretical chemistry. “Noé has made transformative contributions at the interface of machine learning and theoretical chemistry,” says Professor and TCI Director Xuhui Huang. “From Boltzmann Generators to BioEmu, his innovations in molecular sampling and protein dynamics have addressed some of the most difficult problems in statistical mechanics. His work has not only deepened our understanding of molecular systems but also opened new directions for the future of theoretical chemistry.”
The annual Joseph O. Hirschfelder Prize in Theoretical Chemistry was established by the Theoretical Chemistry Institute in 1991 from funds donated by Professor Joseph O. Hirschfelder and his wife, Dr. Elizabeth S. Hirschfelder. Professor Hirschfelder was the founder of the Theoretical Chemistry Institute at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and had a distinguished career of teaching, research, and public service at UW–Madison for over forty years.
In 2022, TCI launched the Hirschfelder Visitor Program to honor outstanding mid-career theoretical chemists. Through this initiative, four prominent mid-career theoreticians have visited Madison in 2024-2025. TCI has successfully recruited three new faculty members over the past few years: Assistant Professor Micheline Soley, affiliate Associate Professor Yuan Ping (MSE), and affiliate Associate Professor Reid Van Lehn (CBE). These new hires have greatly strengthened the research portfolio of TCI, helping to create a more comprehensive theoretical chemistry program and attract talented graduate students. The theoretical chemistry program has risen back into the Top 10 in the latest U.S. News rankings.
Weix Group
Research in Professor Dan 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 the 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 couple abundant, but unreactive, aryl triflates and aryl chlorides with alkyl halides and alcohols, the discovery that cobalt is better than nickel for more hindered cross‐electrophile coupling reactions, and a new, non-radical approach to use alkyl carboxylic acids as alkyl sources in cross-coupling. A theme this past year was collaboration: our papers include collaborations with Buller, Stahl, Guzei, Ackerman-Biegasiewicz (Emory), Paton (CSU), Rafiee (UMKC), Novartis, and GSK. Finally, the group had a mysterious invasion of small plastic ducks, which appeared overnight in nearly every location (even inside glove boxes)! The origins of this experiment in whimsy remain unknown.
Dan was on sabbatical for the 2024-2025 school year, which provided extra time for grant writing (new grants from NSF, Novartis, Lilly) and scholarship – 2024 ended up being our most productive year as a lab ever! This school year, Dan is teaching the Advanced Organic Chemistry course for undergraduates (Chemistry 547) and will continue to teach Structure Determination (Chemistry 605). It is great fun to return to teaching undergraduates after years of teaching only graduate courses.
Graduation
As always, each academic year brings new arrivals and departures. Herman Recendiz passed his TBE and earned his master’s degree. Benjamin Ahern and Tianrui Wu passed their research proposals and advanced to candidacy. Lauren Ehehalt (Ph.D. ’25) completed her Ph.D. work and moved to Kingsport, TN to take a research position at Eastman. Isabella Priest (M.S. ’24) moved to Dallas to take a lab director position at the University of North Texas–Dallas. Three new undergraduate students joined the group, Anna Rolfs, Lars Erikson, and Zehao Yuan, bringing our total to six, a new high for the group at UW-Madison! Finally, Abigail Ramirez joined the group as a new Ph.D. student. Abi is from the San Francisco Bay Area and has previously done research at San Jose State (Radlauer) and Arizona State University (Rascón).
Wickens Group
A recent manuscript in Science from researchers in the Wickens Group challenges our conventional understanding of an elementary reaction taught in organic chemistry classrooms. This interdisciplinary project brought together organic chemists, computational chemists, and chemical engineers to provide a complete picture of an unusual elimination reaction that defies textbook expectations. Faculty member Zachary Wickens and his team of researchers — Peter Verardi, Liza Ryutov, and Karina Targos — discovered that this elimination reaction produces alkenes with Z-selectivity.
This surprising finding overturns textbook expectations. Conventional elimination reactions typically produce the E-form of the alkene because this geometry minimizes energetically unfavorable steric interactions (repulsion between atoms that are too close together). However, Wickens’ team found that when working with 1,2-bis-sulfonium salts (molecules containing two positively charged sulfur atoms), the elimination reaction surprisingly produces the Z-form instead, creating a Z-alkenyl sulfonium salt.
To understand why this unusual selectivity occurs, Wickens’ team collaborated with computational chemists Poulami Mukherjee, Remy Lalisse, and Osvaldo Gutierrez (UCLA). Their calculations revealed that attractive non-covalent interactions between the adjacent sulfonium groups uniquely stabilize the Z-forming pathway, making it energetically favored over the conventional E-route. More broadly, these data establish that non-covalent interactions can override steric control in elimination reactions.
The team then leveraged this discovery to develop a new synthetic method: a Z-selective C–H functionalization protocol. This method directly transforms highly abundant terminal alkenes into Z-alkenyl sulfonium salts, which can be used in cross-coupling reactions to access an impressive array of Z-alkene products. Z-alkenes are valuable building blocks because they are found in many natural products, but are challenging to access selectively. Tetsuya Inagaki, a visiting scholar in the Wickens group during the fall of 2023, leveraged his expertise in transition metal catalysis to help develop these cross-coupling reactions. Ilia Guzei, Director of Crystallography at UW-Madison, provided crystallographic evidence to support the proposed structure and geometry of the Z-alkenyl sulfonium salt products.
Finally, to demonstrate the practical utility of their method, Wickens collaborated with Megan Kelly and Marcel Schreier from the UW-Madison Department of Chemical Engineering to scale up the reaction to produce decagram quantities of Z-alkenyl sulfonium salts.
Beyond providing a convenient way to synthesize Z-alkenes, this study establishes a new design principle for controlling selectivity in fundamental organic reactions. By demonstrating how non-covalent interactions can override traditional steric effects, this work may inspire textbook revisions in how elimination reactions are taught and understood.
Contributed by Zachary Wickens and Peter Verardi