Now that our work on screening for generality has finally been published in Nature, I wanted to first share a few personal reflections and then highlight the big conclusions that I gleaned from this project.

One common misconception in mechanistic organic chemistry is that reactions are accelerated by speeding up the rate-determining step.

The growing accessibility of computational chemistry has, unfortunately, led to a preponderance of papers with bad computations.

This is the first in what will hopefully become a series of blog posts focusing on the fascinating work of Dan Singleton (professor at Texas A&M).

As an undergraduate student in the sciences at MIT, contempt for management consulting was commonplace.

For many organic chemists, it’s hard to grasp the vast difference between various “fast” units of time.

While IR spectroscopy is still taught in introductory organic chemistry classes, it has been almost completely replaced by NMR spectroscopy and mass spectrometry for routine structural assignments.

In my experience, most computational chemists only know a handful of basic Bash commands, which is a shame because Bash is incredibly powerful.

This thesis, from Christian Sailer at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, is one of the most exciting studies I’ve read this year.

Now that our lab’s site-selective glycosylation has been published, I wanted to share some reflections from the computational portion of the work.