Past Seminars & Events

Professor Amanda Morris
Department of Chemistry
Virginia Tech

From Catalysis to Drug Delivery: Photodynamic Responses in MOFs

Metal–organic frameworks offer a unique platform for controlling chemical reactivity through precise structural and electronic design, yet their behavior under photoexcitation remains incompletely understood. This talk explores how photoinduced metal–ligand bond dynamics in MOFs can be deliberately harnessed to enable function rather than failure. Using Fe-carboxylate frameworks such as MIL-101(Fe) as a model system, we demonstrate that ligand-to-metal charge- transfer excitation transiently weakens metal–carboxylate bonds, generating short-lived coordination vacancies that can participate in catalytic reactions. Time-resolved vibrational and electronic spectroscopies reveal that the lifetime of these photodissociated states can be tuned over orders of magnitude through linker functionalization, directly influencing photocatalytic behavior, including carbon dioxide reduction. Extending this concept beyond catalysis, we show that larger photoinduced structural changes can be leveraged for controlled framework exfoliation and cargo release, enabling light-triggered drug delivery and photodynamic therapeutic applications. Together, these results establish photodynamic bonding as a general design principle for MOFs, illustrating how excited- state coordination chemistry can be programmed to drive reactivity, transport, and on-demand material response across energy and biomedical contexts.

Amanda Morris

Amanda Morris is a Professor of Inorganic and Energy Chemistry and Chair of the Department of Chemistry at Virginia Tech. She received her BS from Penn State University, her PhD from Johns Hopkins University, and completed postdoctoral training at Princeton University. Her research program focuses on understanding light–matter interactions in molecular and extended materials, with particular emphasis on how excited-state processes govern catalysis, charge transport, and structural dynamics in metal–organic frameworks. Morris’s work spans photocatalysis for energy conversion, photoinduced coordination chemistry, and light-triggered material responses, combining electrochemistry, spectroscopy, and time- resolved techniques. She is a recipient of numerous honors, including an NSF CAREER Award, an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, and a Dreyfus Teacher–Scholar Award. Morris serves as an Associate Editor of Chemical Physics Reviews and as an American Chemical Society Expert in Sustainable Energy. She is active in community leadership, serving as the Chair of the Inorganic Division of the American Chemical Society and the chair-elect of the InterAmerican Photochemical Society.

Hosted by Professor Gwendolyn Bailey

Michael Tracey, Ph.D.
Research Fellow
Science and Technology
Cambrex Charles City

Technology Transfer and Process Development of Step 2 for Danicopan

Danicopan is a first-in-class oral Factor D inhibitor used as add-on therapy for patients with paroxysmal nocturnal hemoglobinuria who experience extravascular hemolysis. This presentation follows Step 2 of the commercial synthesis, an N-Boc deprotection, from initial technology transfer through validation and commercial manufacturing at Cambrex Charles City, one of the largest small-molecule API sites in the world. The transferred process used solvents and unit operations that were not well suited for large-scale manufacturing. Applying green chemistry principles, the team completed an acid and solvent screen that replaced problematic solvents and simplified the workup. Spike, fate, and purge studies, Design of Experiments, and Proven Acceptable Range studies fully characterized the process and established Normal Operating Ranges and in-process controls to support validation. The optimized process delivered 1,319 kg of the intermediate across 29 batches with high purity and yield. Attendees will see a practical case study of a common reaction transformed into a greener, faster, and more robust manufacturing process.

Michael Tracey

Michael Tracey grew up in Minnesota and received his BS in chemistry from Denison University (Ohio). He returned to Minnesota to attend the University of Minnesota and under the direction of Professor Richard Hsung where he investigated the synthesis and reactivity of allenamides and ynamides. Michael then moved on to a post-doctoral position at Stanford University with Professor Barry Trost. Staying in California, Michael joined the Process Research and Development group at Theravance in South San Francisco. In 2008, he moved to the Chemical Development group at Cambrex Charles City (Iowa) where he is a Senior Research Fellow who has worked on 30+ projects that were transferred to production scale ranging from 0.5 kg to >1000 kg.

Hosted by Professor Alexander Grenning

Professor Sapna Sarupria
Department of Chemistry
University of Minnesota

Formulations for Biologics: A Tango Between Biomolecules and Solvent Governs Stability

Development and distribution of biological formulations – including therapeutic proteins, vaccines, and gene therapy products – is bottlenecked by the cold chain requirement, which preserves these formulations at refrigerated temperatures. To alleviate the need for cold storage, small molecule excipients can be added to formulations to improve temperature stability. However, this process is iterative, time-consuming, and expensive. We leverage computer simulations to elucidate the molecular-level details of excipient mechanisms, contributing to a more information-driven approach to excipient selection. Our studies highlight that molecular systems behave not because of strong interactions, but because of weak, solvent-mediated effects that affect the thermodynamics and dynamics of the system. In this talk, I will show how coordinated solvent and biomolecular interactions modulate the molecular stability and self-assembly of biomolecules. I will demonstrate how understanding molecular mechanisms can enable rational design of formulations and developing descriptors that can unify the broad range of mechanisms through which excipients affect biomolecular stability. Lastly, I will describe novel computational approaches developed in our lab that enable computationally feasible studies of stability of virus capsids in various excipient solutions. In my talk, I will highlight and discuss the key results from this work collectively pushing the frontiers of rational design of formulations for stable biologics.

Sapna Sarupria

Dr. Sapna Sarupria is an associate professor in the department of Chemistry at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities (UMN). Before joining UMN in Fall 2021, she was an associate professor in the Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Clemson University. She received her Master’s from Texas A & M University, her Ph.D. from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and was a postdoctoral researcher in Princeton University. Her research focuses on developing and applying molecular simulations to study materials relevant to health and energy. She received the NSF CAREER award, ACS COMP Outstanding Junior Faculty Award, Clemson’s Board of Trustees Award of Excellence and the CoMSEF Impact Award. She is the co- founder of the NSF-funded Institute of Computational Molecular Science Education (I-CoMSE), co-organizer of virtual seminar series “Statistical Thermodynamics and Molecular Simulations (STMS)”, associate editor for LiveCoMS -- Living Journal of Computational Molecular Simulation, co- Director the NSF-funded National Research Traineeship program (NRT) Data-Driven Discovery and Engineering from Atoms to Processes (3DEAP), co-chair of 2028 Water Gordon Research Conference, and elected trustee of the not-for-profit Computer Aids for Chemical Engineering (CACHE).

Hosted by Professor Ilja Siepmann

Professor Jessica Lamb
Department of Chemistry
University of Minnesota

Harnessing the potential of strong, main-chain dipoles in polymers

The core of physical organic chemistry is the relation of an organic (macro)molecule’s chemical structure to its reactivity/properties. This simple concept is a powerful tool to understand fundamental mechanisms, solve problems, improve sustainability, and establish design principles across a wide variety of fields. The Lamb group takes a physical organic approach to problems at the interface of polymer science and catalysis to transform how materials are made and un-made. Much of our work has been on polyoxazolidinones (POxa), which are an emerging polyurethane subclass for high-performance thermoplastic/ electronic applications that have high thermal stability due to the five-membered heterocycles incorporated into the polymer backbone. We address many synthetic limitations of POxa and systematically investigate their structure- property relationships, particularly the effect of the strong, oriented Oxa dipole on material properties.

Jessica Lamb

Jessica Lamb is an Assistant Professor and McKnight Land-Grant Professor at the University of Minnesota, where her group has worked at the interface of physical organic, catalysis, and polymer chemistry since 2020. Their current research interests include studying polymers with non-ionic dipoles in the backbone, understanding N-heterocyclic carbene adducts for catalysis and energy applications, and combining disparate mechanisms of polymerization to access novel block copolymers. Jessica is the recipient of the Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award (2026), AAAS Marion Milligan Mason Award (2025), the 3M Non-Tenured Faculty Award (2022), the ACS Division of Professional Relations (PROF) Leadership Development Award (2022), and was an ACS Division of Organic Chemistry Young Investigator and ACS PMSE Early Investigator. Before starting her independent career, Jessica was an NIH postdoctoral fellow at MIT with Prof. Jeremiah Johnson, an NSF graduate research fellow at Cornell University with Prof. Geoffrey Coates (PhD 2017), and graduated summa cum laude with a BS in Chemistry from the University of North Dakota (2012).

Hosted by Professor Marc Hillmyer

Professor Tim Lodge
Department of Chemistry
Department of Chemical Engineering & Material Sciences
University of Minnesota

Spontaneous Fission and Fusion of Block Copolymer Micelles

Block copolymers provide a remarkably versatile platform for achieving desired nanostructures by self-assembly, with dimensions ranging from a few nanometers up to microns. In particular, block copolymer micelles in selective solvents are of interest across a range of technologies, including drug delivery, imaging, catalysis, lubrication, and extraction. While block copolymers generally adopt the morphologies familiar in small molecule surfactants and lipids (i.e., spherical micelles, worm- like micelles, and vesicles), one key difference is that polymeric micelles are typically not at equilibrium. This is a result of strong segregation; the length of the core-forming block, coupled to a large interfacial tension, make it difficult for changes to re- arrange once micelles are formed. The kinetic barriers involved can easily approach 100 kBT. When micelles are significantly larger or smaller than the equilibrium size, fission and fusion mechanisms, respectively, can become operative. We will describe measurements using dynamic light scattering, small-angle X-ray scattering, and liquid-phase TEM to follow both processes in detail, with some remarkable and unexpected results. For example, the data suggest that fission proceeds through a metastable intermediate state, which is not anticipated by theory. Fusion is “quantized”, in the sense that a population of micelles completely undergoes one fusion event to double the average aggregation number, before a second or third event takes place, suggesting that the rate constant for fusion is a strongly decreasing function of micelle size. In order for fusion to be observed, it is necessary to reduce the steric barrier providing by the corona chains, which can be achieved by systematically reducing the solvent quality for the corona block.

Tim Lodge

Tim Lodge graduated from Harvard College with a B.A. cum laude in Applied Mathematics in 1975. He completed his PhD in Chemistry at Wisconsin in 1980 with John Schrag, and then spent 20 months as a National Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at NIST, with Charles Han. Since 1982, he has been on the Chemistry faculty at Minnesota and, in 1995, he also became a Professor of Chemical Engineering & Materials Science. In 2013, he was appointed a Regents Professor, the University’s highest academic rank. Tim Lodge has been recognized with the American Physical Society (APS) Polymer Physics Prize (2004), the International Scientist Award from the Society of Polymer Science, Japan, (2009), the American Chemical Society (ACS) Award in Polymer Chemistry (2010), the Hermann Mark Award (2015) and the Paul Flory Education Award (2018) of the ACS Division of Polymer Chemistry, the Sustained Research Award from the Neutron Scattering Society of America (2020), and the Chemistry of Thermoplastic Elastomers Award, ACS Rubber Division (2026. He has been elected to Fellowship in the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the APS, the ACS, and the Neutron Scattering Society of America. In 2016, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2024 to the National Academy of Engineering. From 2001 – 2017, Tim Lodge served as the Editor-in-Chief of the ACS journal Macromolecules. In 2011, he became the founding Editor for ACS Macro Letters. From 2005 – 2022 he was Director of the NSF-funded Materials Research Science & Engineering Center (MRSEC) at Minnesota. He has authored or co-authored over 540 papers in the field of polymer science, and advised or co-advised over 150 PhD students and postdoctoral fellows. His research interests center on the structure and dynamics of polymer liquids, including solutions, melts, blends, and block copolymers, with particular emphases on self-assembling systems using rheological, scattering and microscopy techniques.

Hosted by Professor Theresa Reineke

Professor P. Andrew Evans
Department of Chemistry
Queens University

Stereoselective Construction of Challenging C-C Bonds and the Development of Antimetastatic Agents

The seminar will explore the development and application of new stereoselective C-C bond-forming reactions in the synthesis of bioactive agents. Specifically, it will highlight a novel dynamic kinetic resolution of a,b-unsaturated aldehydes,^[1] the catalytic asymmetric alkylation of homoenolates^[2] and the development of a concise, efficient and scalable synthesis of antimetastatic agents.^[3]

References

1. (a) Majhi, J.; Turnbull, B. W. H.; Ryu, H.; Park, J.; Baik, M.-H.; Evans, P. A. J. Am Chem. Soc. 2019, 141, 11770. (b) Ma, J.; Li, H.; Majhi, J.; Evans, P. A. Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2025, e202520674
2. Wright, T. B.; Turnbull, B. W. H.; Evans, P. A. Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2019, 58, 9886.
3. (a) Bhavin V. Pipaliya, B. V.; Trofimova, D. N.; Grange, R. L.; Aeluri, M.; Deng, X.; Shah, K.; Craig, A. W.; Allingham, J. S.; Evans, P. A. J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2021, 143, 6847. (b) D. N. Trofimova, M. Aeluri, K. D. Veeranna, Y. Jiang, R. L. Grange, B. V. Pipaliya, M. Subaramanian, A. W. Craig, P. A. Evans and J. S. Allingham, J. Med. Chem. 2024, 67, 5315.

P. Andrew Evans

Professor P. Andrew Evans is the Alfred R. Bader Chair of Organic Chemistry and a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Organic and Organometallic Chemistry in the Department of Chemistry at Queen’s University. He is also a Changjiang Scholar at Central South University in China. He received a B.Sc. with honors in Applied Chemistry at Newcastle Polytechnic in 1987 and completed his Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge in 1991 under the supervision of Andrew B. Holmes, FRS. He then pursued postdoctoral research with Philip D. Magnus, FRS, at the University of Texas at Austin as a NATO Postdoctoral Fellow. In 1993, he began his independent career at the University of Delaware, where he was promoted to Professor before moving to Indiana University in 2001. In 2006, he became the Heath Harrison Chair of Organic Chemistry at the University of Liverpool before assuming his current role in 2012. His recent awards include the R. U. Lemieux Award, the Paul G. Gassman Distinguished Service Award, the Harry and Carol Mosher Award, a Changjiang Scholar Award, an ACS Cope Scholar Award and the RSC Pedler Award. He has been actively involved in the ACS Division of Organic Chemistry, serving as a Member-at-Large, Councilor, National Organic Symposium Executive Officer and Division Chair. He currently co-chairs the ACS-DOC Graduate Research Symposium. Professor Evans has held editorial roles as an Associate Editor for Chemical Communications and Synthesis. He is also the former Editor-in-Chief and current President of Organic Reactions. He has published over 150 papers, articles, reviews, book chapters and monographs and has delivered more than 500 plenary and invited lectures.

Hosted by Professor Alexander Grenning

Professor Zhi-Xiang Yu
College of Chemistry
Peking University, Beijing, China

Transition Metal Catalyzed Ring Formation Reactions and a Mild Arene Hydrogenation Method

Many natural products and pharmaceuticals have complex polycyclic structures that present synthetic challenges. There are many powerful reactions (Diels-Alder, Pauson-Khand, Grubbs ring-closing metathesis, Wender arene-alkene photocycloadditions, and others), but new ring formations are always in high demand. For the last 20 years, my group has pioneered in the development of more than twenty new Rh-catalyzed ring-forming reactions. Applications of these new reactions in total synthesis has been demonstrated by us and by other research groups.

I will discuss the development and mechanistic elaboration of several transition metal-catalyzed reactions to construct difficult seven- and eight-membered rings, as well as applications of these reactions for the synthesis of natural products.

In the second part of the talk, I will describe our recent discovery of a new mild arene hydrogenation reaction that occurs at room temperature under 1 atmosphere of hydrogen gas, which provides a convenient approach to reach a variety of useful saturated six-membered rings in synthesis.

Zhi-Xiang Yu

Resume of Training and Appointments 

• 2008-now Professor (Chang-Jiang Professor since 2015), College of Chemistry, Peking University (Principal Investigator, Theoretical and Synthetic Organic Chemistry Lab, PKU) 
• 2004-2008 Associate Professor, College of Chemistry, Peking University 
• 2002-2004 Postdoctoral Associate with Professor Kenneth N. Houk 
• 2001-2002 Postdoctoral Associate with Professor Mark Mascal 
• 1997-2001 Ph.D, Department of Chemistry, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Computational Chemistry with Professor Yun-Dong Wu 
• 1994-1997 MS, Department of Chemistry, Peking University, Beijing, China. Synthetic Organic Chemistry with Qingzhong Zhou
• 1987-1991 BS, Department of Chemistry, Wuhan University, Inorganic Chemistry with Jie Wan

Research Interests

Computational and Synthetic Organic Chemistry to advance organic chemistry in the following areas:

1. Studying mechanisms of organic reactions
2. Developing new reactions and catalysts
3. Synthesizing natural products and pharmaceutical molecules

Hosted by Professor Tom Hoye

The 25th annual Chemistry Graduate Student Research Symposium symposium primarily consists of research presentations by third-year graduate students in the Chemistry Ph.D. program at the University of Minnesota. Presentations will take place in four concurrent sessions and will be 20 minutes in length with an additional 5 minutes reserved for discussion. All presentations will be formally assessed by a committee of faculty members and distinguished celebrity judges. Travel awards will be presented to those individuals judged to have given the top three seminars in each of the four sessions for a total of twelve awards. Written feedback will also be provided to all presenters.

Check for more details at 3rd-year Graduate Student Research Symposium Website.

Dr. Chrissy Stachl
Trauma-informed somatic empowerment coach and organizational change consultant
Oakland, CA

Unwritten rules, hidden costs: Navigating power dynamics and conflict in R1 academic environments

Academic departments run on unwritten rules—implicit norms about who speaks, who defers, how conflict gets handled, and who absorbs the cost when it isn’t—shaped by entrenched power dynamics. This session opens by grounding participants in what research actually tells us about hidden curricula and power dynamics in R1 environments, with particular attention to the implicit com- munication around accountability and what that means for graduate student professional development. We’ll also examine the neuroscientific impact of unresolved conflict—what happens in the nervous system when harm goes unnamed, and how that shapes long-term capacity for learning, leadership, and belonging. 

From there, the session moves into practical, skill-based content: naming and practicing embodied tools for navigating conflict and accountability. Participants will work in small groups to practice staying regulated and rela- tional even when a conversation is uncomfortable. The goal is not a new behavioral framework to take home— it’s to gain a felt sense of how to navigate these dynamics with more steadiness and less reactivity. 

This session is designed for faculty, staff, and graduate students navigating the everyday complexity of departmental life.

Chrissy Stachl

Dr. Chrissy Stachl is a trauma-informed somatic empowerment coach and organizational change consultant based in Oakland, CA. She holds a PhD in Chemistry from UC Berkeley, a background in neuroscience and medicine, and 600+ hours of somatic coaching training—a combination that lets her bridge intellectual rigor with body-based, emotionally attuned support for her clients in a unique way. Through her coaching practice, Chrissy works 1:1 with high-achieving adults who look successful on paper but feel quietly disconnected, overextended, or unfulfilled inside. Together with her clients, she unwinds patterns of over-functioning and self-abandonment, rebuilds the capacity to feel joy and desire, and supports a return to internal authority rather than external validation. Through Reflecting Equity, her organizational consulting practice, Chrissy supports STEM organizations in creating cultures that can actually hold the discomfort that real culture change requires—integrating nervous system literacy and relational safety into equity and culture work.

Dr. Stachl's talk is the latest installment in the Chemistry Climate Event Series, a semiannual workshop series that helps us foster a department that is even more diverse, creative, and successful in every aspect of our mission. Learn more about Chemistry Climate Events.

Professor Theresa Reineke
Department of Chemistry
University of Minnesota

Tailoring Macromolecules by Design: Functional Polymers for Therapeutic Delivery and Sustainable Formulation

Multifunctional macromolecules are essential to advancing technologies in drug and nucleic acid delivery, gene editing, and sustainable materials in formulation science. Realizing this potential requires polymer architectures purposefully designed to balance multiple, often competing, functional demands: payload binding, colloidal stability, biocompatibility, cellular uptake, and intracellular release. To meet this challenge, we have developed a synthesis-centered discovery platform built around combinatorial polymerization, enabling us to systematically vary monomer chemistry, composition, sequence statistics, and chain architecture across expansive copolymer libraries. Focusing on nucleic acid delivery, we have constructed families of statistical copolymers tailored to package, protect, and deliver mRNA, DNA, and CRISPR cargoes. By rationally tuning cationic content, hydrophobic comonomers, and architectural features, we have identified distinct design principles for each payload class and uncovered macromolecular motifs that drive efficient cellular uptake, endosomal escape, and genome editing. This polymer-driven approach has produced architectures achieving high genome editing efficiency, outperforming commercial formulation agents. In parallel, we have extended this design philosophy to sustainable polymers, developing the cationic ring-opening polymerization of biomass-derived levoglucosan to access stereoregular, functional polysaccharides whose pendant chemistry and architecture can be tuned to deliver targeted thermal, mechanical, and degradation profiles for next- generation sustainable formulations. High-throughput characterization and data-driven analysis support this work, but the central advance lies in the macromolecules themselves: polymers engineered with the chemical and structural sophistication needed to function as next-generation delivery vehicles. Our framework demonstrates how purposeful macromolecular design can unlock new performance regimes and accelerate the development of functional polymer materials across biomedicine and formulation science.

Theresa Reineke

Theresa M. Reineke is the Prager Endowed Chair in Macromolecular Science and a Distinguished McKnight University Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Minnesota. She also holds graduate faculty appointments in the Departments of Chemical Engineering/Materials Science and Pharmaceutics. She received a B.S. Degree from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, a M.S. Degree from Arizona State University, and a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. She then received a National Institutes of Health Postdoctoral Research Fellowship for her work in gene therapy at the California Institute of Technology prior to beginning her independent faculty career. Her research group is focused on enabling fundamental and applied technology advancements in the fields of macromolecules for nucleic acid delivery and gene editing, oral delivery of therapeutics, and sustainability. She has published over 200 manuscripts and manages a large group of researchers supported by several corporate, private and national funding agencies. Reineke is a Fellow of the American Chemical Society, Royal Society of Chemistry, along with the Kavli and Alfred P. Sloan Foundations. She has received numerous awards, including in the 2005 National Science Foundation CAREER and Beckman Foundation Young Investigator Awards, 2008 Camille and Henry Dreyfus Teacher- Scholar Award, 2009 National Institutes of Health Director’s New Innovator Award, 2012 Outstanding New Investigator Award from the American Society of Gene and Cell Therapy, 2017 Carl S. Marvel Creative Polymer Chemistry Award from the American Chemical Society Division of Polymer Chemistry, 2018 DuPont Nutrition and Health Sciences Excellence Medal, and 2022 Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award from the American Chemical Society. Reineke has also served for 11 years as an Associate Editor for the journals ACS MacroLetters and Chemical Science and in 2023 became Editor-in Chief of Bioconjugate Chemistry. Further, Reineke is cofounder of two biotech companies in the field of nucleic acid delivery: Nanite, Inc., and LiberateBio, Inc.

Hosted by Professor Jessica Lamb