Celebrating Breakthroughs in Cyclopropene Sequence Control, CANAL Membranes, and Dr. Zexin Jin’s PhD Journey

Congratulations to Ben and Jessica! They finally cracked the secret code of cyclopropenes (it was once so mysterious!) and achieved controlled single addition of cyclopropenes at any desired locations along a living ROMP polymer - See the story in Chem and highlight by C&EN.  Let us know if you would like to try these cyclopropenes for your research! 
4th PhD minted! Congratulations to Dr. Zexin Jin on his heroic efforts to develop the synthetic methodology, design aesthetically pleasing molecules, and understand the effects of CBD antiaromaticity! He is the only student in our group who doesn't work with polymers and established our project on CBD-containing polycyclic conjugated hydrocarbons from scratch. We will miss you Dr. "Gin" -- wish you all the best for postdoc in the Nuckolls group! 
Holden figured out the tricks to make very high MW (>300 KDa) CANAL ladder polymers, which formed nice membranes for gas separation, and discovered changing simple substituents can significantly increase permeability without compromising selectivity. The collaborative work with the Smith lab (MIT) was published in Macromolecules.