Brown University Department of Chemistry

Not a seat left for the Chemistry Undergraduate Graduation Ceremony!

Congratulations to Chemistry's PhDs, Tilas, Prateek, Julia, Meg, Timea, Zoey, Rongzhen, and Stephen!

Congratulations to this year's Potter Prize winner, Timea Kolozsvary! (pictured with Timea's equally proud advisor, Prof. Ben McDonald!) The Potter Prize is awarded to the best chemistry PhD dissertation of the year.

Congratulations Meg!

Huge congratulations to Meg Shieh for winning the prestigious Joukowsky Outstanding Dissertation Award in the physical sciences!

Meg, who receives her doctoral degree in chemistry this May, is being recognized for her groundbreaking dissertation: “Chemical Tool Development for Elucidating the Mechanistic Roles of Sulfane Sulfur in Redox Signaling.” Her research tackles a massive challenge in chemical biology: creating innovative tools to detect, deliver, and understand reactive sulfur species, molecules that are crucial to cellular signaling and human disease, but historically incredibly difficult to measure.

Next up, Meg is headed to Bethesda, Maryland this July to begin her role as an NIH IRTA Postdoctoral Fellow. We can't wait to see how she continues to shape the future of medicine and chemical biology!

Read more: https://graduateschool.brown.edu/news/2026-05-12/joukowsky-shieh

Brown University Department of Chemistry

Chemistry Concentrator Simon Nirenberg, Class of 2028 featured in News from Brown. Simon received a prestigious Goldwater Scholarship! Congratulations! https://www.brown.edu/news/2026-05-12/fellowships-goldwater-oxcam-knight-hennessy?utm_id=97757_v0_s00_e231_tv2_tp1_a1demo0dynvuim&fbclid=IwY2xjawRwgR5leHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEecdebVUYAjTaO_NDZApEMSkFix87U2cQkhSMTKBVkfPLaLPztvQfl8Yifz1g_aem_ePLK3DYlwFHrus5fwLTl5A

Five Brown University students and a recent alumna earn prestigious fellowships Four Brown University undergraduates, a medical student and a Class of 2025 graduate were named among this year’s classes of Goldwater, Oxford-Cambridge and Knight-Hennessy scholars.

2026 Brown Chemistry Alumni & Friends Reception

Thank you, Bakers! The Chemistry Graduate Student Leadership Committee (GSLC) Bake Sale raised $368 at yesterday's bake sale! This money will be used to assemble hygiene kits for local Rhode Islanders in need. Building on this success, the GSLC is planning an encore performance of baking deliciousness next semester.

Happing NOW! GSLC Bake Sale on Manning Green (MacMillan SciLi area)
Cookies Brownie, gluten free options. All proceeds to benefit the Greater RI Community. Your purchases and donations will be used to buy hygiene products and other basics.

GSLC Bake Sale TODAY! 12-3:00pm MacMillan Green

TODAY! ***Chemistry Colloquium*** Richard Liu, Harvard University presents : Altered Cross-Coupling Reactions: Methods for Synthetic Repurposing
3:00 pm MacMillan Hall
"My research group is focused on the invention and understanding of catalytic strategies that repurpose conventional cross-coupling partners to generate new products. We will discuss methods that incorporate formal nitrene, oxygen-atom, and carbene insertion into Suzuki–Miyaura cross-coupling cycles. We will present a reversible arylpalladium(II) isomerization process that proceeds through the mild formation of metal-aryne intermediates. This “ring-walking” step can be incorporated into dynamic kinetic resolution schemes that effectively modify the regioselectivity of cross-coupling. Finally, we will present Ni-catalyzed sulfur excision reactions that provide unintuitive but enabling retrosynthetic disconnections for the synthesis of fused heterocycles. These examples highlight how conceptually simple catalytic reactions can empower an accelerated exploration of chemical space without needing to acquire or synthesize new building blocks."