MAJOR UPDATE: I found the best free restaurant bread in the United States www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

Modular enantioselective photocatalysts from privileged pybox scaffolds Modern organic synthesis relies upon the availability of chiral catalysts to control the stereochemistry of bond-forming reactions. Several families of chiral catalysts have become recognized as “privileged” structures because of their notable generality ...

In @science.org for chemsky this week, @tehshik.bsky.social teams up with @chemguyeli.bsky.social to showcase the versatile advantages of pairing a pybox ligand with a carbazole chromophore in one molecular catalyst

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

$2.45 billion NIH grant cuts and ~2300 terminated active research grants were DOGE'd in early 2025
Who were most affected?
www.pnas.org/doi/full/10....
Early career and women researchers

screen shot showing the percent change in R01-equivalent awards between 2024 and 2025

😭😭
grants.nih.gov/news-events/...

Graph of award probability of R35 and R01 from NIH factbook as a function of review rank percentile. As is apparent, 2025 is a significant departure, with lower award probabilities at all scores <40 and significant departures from norm, where even being in the top 10% is no longer a nearly certain indicator of success. Data source: https://report.nih.gov/nihdatabook/report/302

The data is in: the NIH goalposts have shifted.

What were once almost certain fundable scores have become coin flips and what used to be likely grants have become aspirational, leading to fewer awards.

Another manifestation of how HHS policies have led to fewer awards and less science.

Our department is looking for a PRODiG+ fellow – the appointment is two years, followed by conversion to a tenure-track assistant professor at the conclusion of the fellowship. A unique opportunity!
apply.interfolio.com/178732

Wow, great initiative!! Grant churn will only increase, so having funds to keep competitive projects running in the meantime is huge.

record.umich.edu/articles/u-m...

Maybe I am just missing it... does the new Chemrxiv website have RSS feeds? The organic specific RSS feed we've used is dead...

What I love about that six word Hemingway story, "For sale: baby shoes, never worn" is that in those few words we instantly grasp the sadness of what it is trying to tell us: the baby was so freakishly massive when it was born that it could never wear the shoes its parents had bought for it.

Happy 23rd birthday to Juan! 🥳

And, of course, a paper cake to celebrate!

We've been thinking A LOT about the LMCT excited state as amenable to manipulation for catalyst-controlled reactivity. S/O to the Zuo (pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10....) and Yoon (onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...) groups for also exploring the potential of these ES for non-intrinsic reactivity!

Really excited to shared this work! Congrats especially to Zilu and Yetong, who worked through the two divergent mechanistic paradigms to explore this system thoroughly. And a very fruitful collaboration with Dr. Arshad Mehmood in the Levine Group!

Leveraging Divergent Ligand-to-Metal Charge-Transfer Excited State Pathways for Catalyst Control over Alkoxyl Radical Reactivity Ligand-to-metal charge-transfer (LMCT) excitation has emerged in recent years as a powerful modality in organic synthesis, namely for the generation of heteroatom-centered radicals through formal metal–ligand bond homolysis from the LMCT excited state. However, the exploitation of alternative LMCT excited state processes has been extremely limited. Here, we describe a general strategy for tuning the reaction course from LMCT excited states of titanium alkoxides. This reactivity paradigm has been exploited for tandem β-scission/Giese addition reactions of both scission-amenable and scission-recalcitrant alcohols under divergent reaction pathways of metal–ligand bond homolysis and excited state β-scission through judicious choice of electronically tuned Ti catalysts. Through intramolecular competition studies, catalyst-controlled scission is shown to facilitate a rate enhancement of up to 103-fold over the intrinsic scission of free alkoxyl radicals, highlighting the impact of accessing the excited state scission paradigm. Computations support the relevance of a scission-promoting LMCT excited state with stereoelectronically aligned alkoxyl radical cation character to enable direct, selective β-scission.

🎉 Thrilled to share our latest work on Ti-LMCT photocatalysis, out now in @jacs.acspublications.org. We show how Ti-catalysts bearing electronically-differentiated ligands can be leveraged for divergent reaction pathways from the LMCT excited state. Read it here: pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/....

Five classes I took in college.

The Atomic Bomb in History and Culture
Madness and Medicine
The Vikings and the Nordic Heroic Tradition
Justice
Introduction to Scientific Computing

Bruce Springsteen - Streets Of Minneapolis (Official Audio) YouTube video by Bruce Springsteen

I wrote this song on Saturday, recorded it yesterday and released it to you today in response to the state terror being visited on the city of Minneapolis. It’s dedicated to the people of Minneapolis, our innocent immigrant neighbors and in memory of Alex Pretti and Renee Good.

Stay free

reminds me of this absurd looking column I ran in grad school...

Pyridoxal‐Inspired Photo‐Decarboxylase Catalysis: Photochemical Decarboxylation of Unprotected Amino Acids A photocatalytic method for the decarboxylation (deCO2) of unprotected amino acids inspired by pyridoxal-dependent decarboxylases is described. Catalytic condensation of amino acids onto a pyridoxal-...

We use HINA in our Photo-Decarboxylase catalysis system we described last year - onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Tim wrote up an entry for EROS on our favorite PLP-mimicking organocatalyst, 3-hydroxyisonicotinaldehyde (HINA). Check it out!

two eager, bright-eyed first year graduates standing in a research lab alongside a barely holding it together junior PI

Very excited to welcome two new 1st-year grad students, Juan Perez and Durjay Roy, to the @lipshultzsbu.bsky.social group!

Right. Figured if they are applying this to ESI awards now as a matter of routine, that probably signals a sea change of some sort.

Chatting with slightly more advanced peers, seems to be a first for the MIRA, despite CRs being the norm recently. I wonder if it had been spared from that generally given the ineligibility for any other grants from GM, but had to do it now given circumstances

I don't know if this is normal, but my ESI MIRA from NIGMS received a 10% budget cut in year 2. As did all of FY 26 renewals as far as I can tell. Again, not sure if this is just SOP under a CR, or something new. So also less $$ going out. reporter.nih.gov/search/5Fd8B...

First minimeeting synthesis workshop of the year! @lipshultzsbu.bsky.social

This is absolutely insane. What a miserable game.

I hope this language choice was referring to the possible likelihood of racemization of the enriched products, and not the value in making them? Either way, this is S-tier trolling.

Big year for the group, and bigger things to come in 2026. Also this annual dinner is a good reminder if how uncoordinated the group generally is. LOTS of zucchini hitting people on the nose/chin...