Starting in the summer of 2003 I was on sabbatical. I was a Royal Society USA Research Fellow at Cardiff University, working with Thomas Wirth. Craig Streu, ’04, and Joe Heinzelmann, ’04 were in Cardiff during that summer working on two projects with Thomas. I joined the Wirth Group in August. Craig finished his Ph. D. in Chemistry at U. Penn and has published his work in Angewandte Chemie!! Joe is working as a professional Chemist.
My sabbatical, 2003-2004 academic year + two summers, to the say the least was a fantastic experience. I worked on a number of projects, some were successful, other were not. The completion of a project that Crystal, Craig, and Amanda had worked was the first project, which, sad to say, failed in the final oxidation step. The rest of the fall was spent on a number of other projects, and the completion of a review paper that was published in Chemical Society Reviews (Chem. Soc. Rev., 2004, 33, 354 – 362.). The spring saw a new project, the use of hypervalent iodine reagents as tetrahydrofuranylating agents, using microwaves to facilitate the reaction. This short communication was published in Synlett (Synlett, 2004 (13) 2291 – 2293). In the Spring of 2004, we organized and held the Cardiff Symposium on Hypervalent Iodine Chemistry. Most of the Major researchers from around the world attended and a great time was had by all!!
In addition to all this hard work in the the lab, I did find time to travel with my family, while we lived in Wales. Trips to London, Bath, Bristol, Durham, Edinburgh, Switzerland, Germany, as well as all over Wales, highlighted our year in the UK. Below are pictures.
At the Royal Society Office with Isaac Newton, a prominent member of the Royal Society
Bath Museum in . . . Bath!
St. David’s Cathedral in our Illinois Colors.
