from July 25th to August 3rd (3)

Monday, July 28th, I spent nearly a whole morning preparing a PPT introducing the history of China that would be used in the presentation arranged by Tracy for a group of high school students from Detroit. We six took about one and a half hour presenting stuff like geography, history, food, educaiton, etc. Acturally it seemed they were more interested in which NBA team was my favourite. Anyway, that presentation looked successful and was quite interactive.
Then in the afternoon I edited the poster and handed it to Jon and Dr. Wolfe for correction.

Tuesday I did routine lab work as usual. The poster was submited to Prof. Coppola before 12 am. Then in the language class on Wednesday we talked a little bit about the poster session stuff, including asking and answer, confirmation and explanation, with Mindy. Then there came Thursday, the last day of July, when the poster session was held.

We were asked to arrive at Chem BLDG at 8:30 am. to set up our posters and then have a refreshment. Our six posters were required not to be set next to each other. (Mine and Nan's were next to each other.) Students from Notre Dame University also took part in this session. I think most of them brought poster on Biology study, which were hard to understand with our limited knowledge on that. We then went to a undergraduate hall to have our morning presentations. So, students chosen from US REU, UM/PKU REU, and N.D. gave their talk to us and the US students in PKU also presented their work during this summer in Beijing through skype connection , which was interrupted by the network problem from time t time. After a professor of biochemistry's presentation of small molecular of bioactivities, we went back to Chem BLDG for lunch at nearly half past one.

The food there were unbelievably wonderful. I heard that it was mexican flavor food after that. I had three full dishes of chicken, beef, and cabbage. Then the poster session began from the ones downstairs (mine was upstairs). Few posters were focusing on organic chemistry, while tons of posters with amazing pictures on them were predominantly on biochemistry. I looked at the Thailand student's (in Sanford group) poster and provided a few idea for her future direction(perhaps one of them made sense). I also stopped by another guy's explaining a methodolody of group shift in pyrrobenzene system and asked about the driving force of that rearrangement reaction.

When it became my turn, I enjoyed quite a period of time myself standing there keeping a smile while Nan was with me also. Well, I admit both the appearance and data of my poster were not that attractive( but the information was plenty). Then my colleague in lab came... we had some small talks killing time. Then Nan's mentor Wei came by, and I introduced my work to him finally. During the time, I noticed that there were a few people walked by and seemed a little interested in this poster but looked like they had no questions about what I wrote on it. After the whole session, we six took pictures together, me having poster in my hand.

Went shopping as usual on Friday, I bought a dozen of chicken wings, seemed cheap.

Continuing optimizing the condition of our Pd-catalyzed carboamination of carbamates, I've got several exciting results this week. During the solvent screening, I found that t-BuOH, dioxane, xylenes all gave a higher NMR yield than toluene, which I used before. To assure the NMR yield, I ran a colomn to isolate the desired product. Working late at night, I finally was able to have a close look at my product wanted, rather than try to figure out the abstract peaks on the spectrum. It was a red solid powder. I identified it even though only 30mg was got. So that was good to see the NMR yield was consistent with my isolate yield.


/Today I ran a colomn on the crude carbamate I got yesterday, and then got beautiful white needlelike crystal and a decent yield. That might be the last time for me to make that substrate. Acturally, Jon and I went to present our work during these past a couple of weeks to Dr. Wolfe and we planned to do some final trial both on the substrate bearing benzyl on the N and the preactivation of our Pd catalyst before turninng to another totally new substrate.

We discussed the Molecule of Year(acturally a sort of exercise given by Dr. Wolfe, to design a reasonable and substantiated total syntheis of a natura product found this year, the group are divided into two team and compete against each other) this noon. In the meeting on Monday, Josh, Jon and Goergia picked my retro synthesis of that MOY. Now we have divided the labor and are going into detail.

I also sent Xiao Qing an Email this week with my synthesis of a piece of Target Molecule and then I'm looking forward to the response./