Huge congratulations to Shain for passing his PhD viva! You did really well and should be proud of your achievements 🥳Thanks so much for all your hard work and for starting the group with me.
(P.S. If anyone is confused about the timeline - the viva was on Friday but I only got the picture now)

Congratulations to Afra and Yaroslavna on finishing their UG research projects and presenting their results at the poster symposium. And well done to Afra for winning the MSci poster prize - amazing work! Thank you both for your time in the group and to Katherine and Jayden for the supervision.

Thanks a lot to Dr Fern Ruamyart, who worked with us for a week to learn our photochemical helicene synthesis in flow. It was great to meet you and to learn about your research with Alyssa Avestro in York! Looking forward to hearing more about this work 😀

Paper submitted, group lunch, and group outing - Tuesday was a busy but fun day. Thanks to Shain, Katherine, Jayden and Afra for all your hard work! And congratulations to Jayden for bowling the game of your life (and putting us all to shame).

Using a 3 step sequence [1) Mallory 2) Palladium-catalysed cross-coupling 3) Mallory] we were able to make unsymmetrical [6]helicenes.

Azahelicenes such as thiazolo-, oxazolo-, pyrido-, and thiadiazolo-helicenes formed some byproducts but were still accessed in synthetically useful yields.

The substrates look quite simple but only few of them are known or were previously prepared via Mallory cyclisations.

I'm proud to present our group's first independent paper! 🥳In this preprint, we show a scalable (> 2g, almost 200 mg/h) synthesis of thia-, oxa-, and azahelicenes in continuous flow. Well done, Katherine, Chenyu, Shain, and Yang!
chemrxiv.org/engage/chemr...