The last couple of weeks have seen a nice little cross-section of work make its way into public view.  Zi’s paper on the “counter-counter-intuitive” (?) mechanism of an electrocyclic process where high force delivered in a conrotatory fashion still results in a symmetry-preferred disrotatory reaction, Donghua’s study of relaxation dynamics in mixed cross-linker systems, and a collaboration with the Fitzgerald and Beratan labs on the xenon-protein interactome!  Classical physical organic mechanisms, some hard core rheology, and non-standard biological molecular recognition… what a great superposition!

A big welcome to Chun-Yu Chiou and Daniel Duan (joint with Widenhoefer), who are joining the team for their Ph.D. work!  Really excited to have them in the lab, and can’t wait to see where their scientific exploration takes them!

Congrats to Zi and his team of MONET collaborators on the publication of their paper “Toughening Hydrogels Through Force-triggered Chemical Reactions that Lengthen Polymer Strands” in Science!  The report is accompanied by a very nice Perspective piece by Bosnjak and Silberstein, available here.

Congrats (again) to our 2020 Ph.D. grads Yudi (right) and Yangju (left), who were back on campus this weekend to participate in their much-delayed hooding ceremony and graduation event!  Fun, but no surprise, to see that they’re tearing it up in the new positions!  We miss them!