Emily Treptow (undergraduate student working jointly in the Baker and Parrill groups) wins the
Second Place in Life Sciences with the work titled "Informatic Analysis of Hydrophobic
Surface Patches to Guide Design of Water-Soluble G-Protein Coupled Receptor Analogs"
Christy Dyer (graduate student working jointly in the Baker and Parrill groups) wins the Second
Place in Life Sciences with the work titled "Hydrophobic Surface Patch Disruption
to Produce Water-Soluble G-Protein Coupled Receptor Analogs"
Brian Hoffman (graduate student working in the Baker group) wins the First Place in Physical and
Applied Sciences with the work titled "Synthesis of novel diffusible signaling factors,
for determination of structure activity relationships and structural stability"
Rachel Wiley (graduate student working in the Baker group) wins the Second Place in Physical and
Applied Sciences with the work titled "Synthesis and stereochemical characterization
of novel diffusible signal factor 2-heptylcyclopropyl-1-carboxylic acid for antibiofilm
action"
Dr. Kensha Clark was awarded $590,000 from the National Science Foundation for her CAREER project
"Exocyclic Imine Ligands for Electron Transfer."
Fall 2021
Dr. Xiaohua Huang was selected as a Dunavant Professor by the College of Arts and Sciences. The endowment recognizes exceptional achievement
in teaching, scholarship, service, and outreach, and includes research support of
$5,000 per year for three years.
Dr. Abby Parrill-Baker, dean of the College of Arts & Sciences and professor for the Department of Chemistry,
was awarded $525,000 from the Memphis and Shelby Crime Commission for her project
“Public Safety Institute.”
Dr. Michael Brown joins the department as an Assistant Professor. Welcome Mike!
Summer 2021
Dr. Tomoko Fujiwara was awarded $68,919 from Texas Tech University with the National Science Foundation
for her project “CPS: Small Inkjet Printed Flexible Electronic CPS with Context-aware
Events of Interest Detection.”
Dr. Xuan Zhao was awarded $475,000 from the National Science Foundation for his project “Catalytic
H2 Evolution by Molecular Cobalt Complexes with Pentadentate Ligands in Aqueous Solutions.”
With the support of the Chemical Catalysis program in the Division of Chemistry of
National Science Foundation, Dr. Xuan Zhao is studying hydrogen production from water
as a promising approach to generate alternative, clean and renewable fuel for the
future. His research has potential to discover new catalysts for hydrogen production
at wide range of aqueous solutions, including both acidic and alkaline solutions,
in the context of future applications in renewable energy conversion.
Darwin Ramirez Alvarez (undergraduate student in the Fujiwara group) wins the First Place in Life and Health
Sciences with the work titled "Synthesis of amino acid derivatives for metal coordination
in hydrogels for tissue regeneration."
Paige Castleman (graduate student in the Baker and Parrill groups) wins the First Place in Physical
and Applied Sciences with the work titled "Computational Ligand Discovery Efforts
to Identify Chemical Tools to Study GPR52."
Martin Guerrero (undergraduate student in the Baker and Parrill groups) wins the Second Place in
Physical and Applied Sciences with the work titled "Experimental Validation of Structure-Based
Pharmacophores: Toward a High-Throughput Screening Tool for GPCR Ligand Discovery."
Thomas Summers (graduate student in the DeYonker group) wins Second Place in Physical and Applied
Sciences with the work titled "Designing Cheminformatics-based Enzyme Quantum Mechanical
Models: A Catechol-O-methyltransferase Case Study."
Kylie Loadholt (undergraduate student in the Brewster group) wins the CAS outstanding undergraduate
award!
Dr. DeYonker was awarded $79,837 from Q-Chem Inc with the U.S. Department of Energy for his project
"New Theory and Ontologies for Quantum Mechanical Cluster Modeling of Proteins and
Enzymes."
Nicole Hoyle joins the department as the new Administrative Associate. Welcome Nicole!
Dr. Daniel Nascimento joins the department as an Assistant Professor. Welcome Daniel!
