Lycoming College awards two students for researching synthetic organic chemistry

2017 Sep 14

Brandon Conrad, from Bloomsburg Pa. with a major in chemistry, helped synthesized new starting materials (chemical compounds) for a chemical reaction using a reagent system (combination of chemicals to effect a certain "job", namely reductive cyclization) invented by my research group (the reagent system was first described by us in The Journal of Organic Chemistry in 2016). They made the starting materials, purified them, and characterized them spectroscopically (how chemists determine and confirm the structures of the molecules they make). Once the starting materials were in hand, they ran the key reaction, reductive radical cyclization on each of the substrates, using our special reagent system.