Department of Chemistry, Wayne State University

The longest day of 2026, for the Northern Hemisphere, is just around the corner, so why not make some s’mores!

Congratulations to Tharuka Karunarathna, recipient of an Excellence in Teaching Services award at !

Wayne State University has been named among the top 1.8% of universities worldwide! WSU is now ranked among the best higher education institutions on the Global 2000 list by the Center for World University Rankings. Earlier this year, WSU was named one of the nation’s top 100 public universities in the U.S. News & World Report Best Colleges rankings for the second consecutive year, while several of its graduate and professional programs also earned national recognition for excellence. The university was also celebrated this spring for its leadership as one of the top 100 universities in the country patenting new technologies.

Wayne State named among top 1.8% universities worldwide Recognized for its academic excellence and impact, Wayne State University has been named among the top 1.8% of universities worldwide in the Global 2000 ranking

Nicole Pejev and Fatima Bazzi made the Chair’s Honor List! The Chairs Honors List represents the top 3% of students in General Chemistry courses. Congratulations!

Our students made a trip to TSRL Inc in Ann Arbor and met the CEO along with some of the senior scientists and team leaders. The students had the opportunity to ask questions about industry careers in biotech and tour their lab space.

TSRL is a preclinical organization focused on helping pharmaceutical, biotech, and academic teams progress early drug candidates with confidence, working with your team to reduce risk, and generate high-quality data.

Thanks to Dean Hartwell of Wayne State University College of Liberal Arts and Sciences for supporting our students’ field trip!

A Departmental Citation for Excellence in Teaching Services was awarded to Godfred Adusei. Congratulations!

The ACS Bridge is offering the Career Kick-Starter Workshop! This workshop provides graduate students in the chemical sciences with the tools to conduct a successful career search and build a sense of community among those selected to participate.

ACS Bridge Career Kick-Starter Workshop - American Chemical Society This workshop provides graduate students and ACS Bridge Fellows in the chemical sciences with the tools to conduct a successful career search and build a sense of community among those selected to participate.

Please join us in congratulating Andrew Yaldo and Mehreen Siddiqui, recipients of the American Chemical Society, Detroit Section Award - Outstanding Chemistry Graduates!

Solomon Effah, of the Walker Lab, has been recognized by Schrödinger, as a winner of the Molecules & Models Virtual Science Fair, an event that builds connections between researchers across institutions and career stages. Congratulations on your presentation: “Controlling Fluorescence in DNA Probes: Structural Design of Perylene-Modified Nucleic Acids for Enhanced Imaging!”

Check out the Walker Lab’s new paper: “Librarian of Alexandria: A Modular Chemical Data Extraction Pipeline to Compare LLM Performance.” Librarian of Alexandria (LoA), is an open-source and lightweight framework for testing large-language models (LLMs) on the task of generating large datasets via direct extraction from scientific literature.

All Authors: Morgan Grougan, Janyan Subasinghe, Mark A. Hix, and Alice Walker

Librarian of Alexandria: A Modular Chemical Data Extraction Pipeline to Compare LLM Performance Dataset creation is a critical component of predictive machine learning technology. In the field of chemistry, large experimental datasets are scarce, especially for niche chemical properties and topics, and their creation is cumbersome and time-consuming when performed manually. Here, we present Li...