Molly was selected to receive the 2023 McCoy Award, which is presented annually to recognize the most outstanding achievements in research by a CCE graduate student. Congratulations, Molly!

Congratulations to Anna for successfully defending her PhD thesis! PhD #6 for the Robb group! This summer, Anna will be moving north to the San Jose area to begin a job as a technical consultant at Exponent. Good luck, Anna! 

Congratulations to Ross for successfully defending his thesis today! Ross will move to the east coast to start a new position at Impact Nano near Boston, MA. Good luck, Ross! We will miss you. 

Congratulations to Corey and Brooke for successfully defending their theses on April 21st and April 24th, respectively! Corey will start at Dow in Performance Silicones and Brooke will head to Northrop Grumman in the Future Technical Leaders program. Good luck to you both! 

Congratulations to Molly for successfully defending her thesis today! This summer Molly will head to UC Berkeley to start her postdoc as a Miller Research Fellow. We are so proud of you!

Congratulations to Jolly for winning the Second Place Oral Presentation Award in the POLY Undergraduate Research Symposium at the spring 2023 ACS meeting! 

Congratulations to Quan for successfully defending his thesis today! Quan was the last PhD student in the Grubbs group and joined the Robb group after Bob's passing in 2021. Quan will return to China to start a job at Huawei. Good luck! 

Congratulations to Molly and coauthors Anna and Skylar on their latest publication appearing today in ACS Macro Letters! We validate an initial rates method that enables the accurate and rapid determination of rate constants for ultrasound-induced mechanochemical transformations. Check it out here.

Max received the 2023 Innovator Award from the Rose Hills Foundation! We are very grateful for this recognition and funding that will support our research on naphthopyran mechanochemistry. 

Our group's first patent was issued today! "Method for controlled release using mechanical force." U.S. Patent 11,584,752, issued February 21, 2023. Congrats to coinventors May Zeng and Xiaoran Hu on this achievement! 

Congratulations to Anna and Wendy on their latest publication appearing in Nature Chemistry! We developed a mechanophore platform enabling the mechanically gated formation of DASA dyes/photoswitches, and used this chemistry to establish a novel method of mechanochemical multicolor lithography. Read the paper here, and check out the news articles from Caltech (here) and Nature Chemistry (here).

Molly McFadden was awarded the prestigious Kathryn A. Day Miller Research Fellowship at UC Berkeley! After graduating from Caltech, she will conduct postdoctoral research in the laboratory of Prof. John Hartwig. Congratulations Molly! 

Max was named a 2022 ACS Polymers Au Rising Star! Check out the announcement, and read our original contribution to this special issue by Stella, Ross, and Anna here.

Congrats to Molly and coauthors Skylar and Yan on their latest publication appearing in JACS! We show that mechanical force enables an anomolous dual ring-opening reaction of naphthodipyran to generate an unusual dimerocyanine dye with near-IR absorption. Read the paper here, and check out a Research Highlight in Nature Synthesis here. We even wrote a little poem about it:

Naphthodipyran.

Two paths diverge, one old of light and one of force anew.

Though light can open only one ring, force pries open two!

Congrats to Stella and coauthors Ross and Anna on their latest publication in ACS Polymers Au! We highlight the significant difference in mechanochemical reactivity between furan-maleimide and anthracene-maleimide mechanophores, despite similar reactivity predicted by CoGEF calculations. Read more about it here! 

Congratulations to Anna who was awarded the 2022-23 Barbara J. Burger Graduate Fellowship! 

Congratulations to Corey and Xiaoran on their latest publication appearing in ACS Macro Letters! We describe a new mechanophore design that enables the effiecient release of cargo molecules in aprotic environments. Read more here.

Congratulations to Jolly Patro on being named a 2022 John Stauffer SURF Fellow at Caltech! 

Anna's recent paper was featured on the front cover of the June issue of ACS Macro Letters! Check it out here.

We are excited to welcome Liam Ordner this summer as an Amgen Scholar! Liam joins us from Georgia Tech where he has been working in the Gutekunst Group. 

Anna's paper examining how mechanophore activity influences the selectivity of mechanochemical chain scission was published today in ACS Macro Lett! Check it out here. 

Max was named a 2022 Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar! Many thanks to the Camille & Henry Dreyfus Foundation for this incredible honor and to the extraordinarily talented members of the Robb group that made it possible! Link here.

Ross and Max were excited for the opportunity to highlight recent research from the Moore group on mechanically triggered release of carbon monoxide with turn-on aggregation-induced emission. Check out the highlight here, which was published in the journal Aggregate.

Max was selected as a 2022 PMSE Young Investigator!  He will present a lecture during the fall ACS meeting in the PMSE Young Investigator Symposium, which is a forum to highlight the professional accomplishments of early-career investigators who are emerging as leaders in the field of polymer science and engineering. Link here.

Max was selected to speak in the Academic Young Investigators Syposium held by the Organic Division of the American Chemical Society at the upcoming fall ACS meeting in Chicago. The symposium will feature pre-tenure professors and will "highlight the vitality of research in the field of organic chemistry."

Quite the exciting day!  We also received the official award notice for a NSF CAREER award (CHE-2145791) that will support our research on naphthopyran mechanochemistry as well as a number of educational initiatives to broaden participation and enable training of undergraduate and graduate students. Props to students Molly and Skylar who contributed significantly to the proposal! Link here.

Max was selected as a 2022 Sloan Research Fellow! Many thanks to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for this tremendous honor and to the hard work and creativity of the Robb group for making it possible! Link here.

Congratulations to Anna and Molly for their recent paper published in Macromolecules! We systematically investigated different methods of characterizing activation rates for scissile mechanophores and provide insight into the role of molecular weight dispersity on ultrasound-induced mechanophore activation. Read more about it here!

Out now in JACS, we provide our perspective on the development of mechanophores for molecular release and the future of this exciting research area. Congratulations to Brooke and coauthors May + Xiaoran for leading the effort! Check it out here.

We are excited to welcome first year graduate students Yu-Ling (Debbie) Tseng and Yan Sun to the Robb group! Debbie recently earned a M.S. in Chemistry from National Taiwan University and Yan earned a B.S. in Chemistry from SUSTech (Shenzhen, China). Welcome aboard!