News
Parul Sharma Awarded Distinguished Graduate Fellowship
We are proud to announce that Parul Sharma has been awarded the Distinguished Graduate Fellowship by the OSU Foundation and Graduate College at Oklahoma State University for the 2025–2026 academic year. This prestigious fellowship recognizes outstanding graduate students for their academic excellence, research achievements, and leadership. Congratulations to Parul on this remarkable accomplishment!
Congratulations, Dr. Kharbanda!!
One of the very best parts of this job is watching your students develop. Congratulations to Dr. Shivangi Kharbanda on passing your Final Defense. She clocked in at 1.0Sanfords, but I thoroughly enjoyed it, along with the discussion that followed. A big thanks to her committee Spencer Pitre, Jeffery White, Elijah Schnitzler, and Chris Fennell, for both the helpful feedback and the support all along the way. Shivangi shared with her committee one more exciting story that is soon to come out, for the first time- so keep a look-out for it. Shivangi's ability to rapidly tackle a nuanced project, sort the details, and take it from good to great, is simply amazing. Good luck Shivangi! I know you are going to do great.
Dr Tobias joined the Weaver Group!
We are delighted to welcome Dr. Tobias von Zons as a Postdoctoral Researcher in Weaver's Lab.
Dr. von Zons earned his Ph.D. from Bielefeld University in 2018. Throughout his career, he has gained valuable experience as a Senior Scientist in API Development and a Research Chemist at Kaimann GmbH (Saint-Gobain Group). Additionally, he has contributed to academia as a Lecturer at Hochschule Hamm-Lippstadt.
We are excited to have him join our team and look forward to his contributions to our research!
New Publication!
I'm excited to share that our group has recently published a new paper in the Journal of Organic Chemistry titled "Dynamically Generated Carbenium Species via Photoisomerization of Cyclic Alkenes: Mild Friedel–Crafts Alkylation." This work demonstrates how light can be used to dynamically drive carbenium ion formation and that this can be used to accomplish very mild Friedel-Crafts reaction and makes access to 1,1-diaryl quaternary centers on 6-membered rings. The reaction can be used to quickly access libraries of 4,4-diaryl piperidines in a single step by coupling them with arenes, providing expedited access to this medicinally relevant motif. Check out the research by Timothy Schoch, Osaid Alkhamayseh, Nathan Herndon, Erik Lantz, and Tyler Fleske! https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.joc.5c00061
